I remember back when Microsoft’s China anti-piracy program included litigation against individual corporate infringers. I particularly recall one such lawsuit that had Microsoft’s local China counsel suing the wrong corporation. Oops.

Times have changed, and Microsoft has not only stepped up their anti-piracy efforts, they have gotten much, much better at the PR and government relations end of things. The best way to go is always to find a win-win solution.

Microsoft has continued to sue the bad guys (note the Tomato Garden suit, which was a big win for them), but has also worked closely with the government and hardware manufacturers to go after large-scale infringement activities.

Via government cooperation, Microsoft (and the U.S. government) was able to make progress on software used by officials, not an insignificant number. Working with industry, Microsoft has made excellent progress on the issue of pre-installed software on PCs.

The latest initiative involves another sector where there is a great deal of infringement:

Information from a communication meeting for a cooperation project between Microsoft and Internet cafes in Yunnan province revealed that since the launch of the project in 2009, over 200 Internet cafes in Kunming, capital of Yunnan, have realized software legalization.

“Software legalization” of course refers to using legal software, including the Windows Operating System and Microsoft Office. Essentially this means they have stopped using pirated copies, although “realization” of “software legalization” sounds like these Net cafes had some sort of epiphanous experience, which I strongly doubt.

The project, according to local media, was jointly launched by Microsoft and Internet cafes in Yunnan and aims to promote the use of authorized software in local Internet cafes so as to ensure the safety and stability of their systems, promote the compliance management of these Internet cafes, and improve their social images [sic].

As you can see, there is already some win-win here. Microsoft is touting security, system stability, something called “compliance management” (to be honest, I’m not quite sure what that means), and public relations. The latter seems a bit of a stretch, and if you’ve ever been in one of these Net cafes, you probably understand where I’m coming from with that comment. Unless it’s a big operation, or a chain, I doubt that they are big on social image. But hey, Microsoft is trying hard here to make all this as appealing as possible.

At the base of the project, Microsoft will provide online office software training courses to these Internet cafes and to laid-off people in Kunming. The training project is predicted to cover 3,000 laid-off people in the city to increase their opportunities to gain new jobs.

Here’s the quid pro quo to the local government. Software training for the unemployed as a retraining program. Very nice. Makes the local officials look good and gives Microsoft a nice image boost in the community. I like that.

More importantly, the local officials will turn around and put pressure on these Net cafes. Lots of tools at their disposal to make sure these places stay clean, if the right incentives are there. We’ll see if this job retraining program, not to mention the overall anti-piracy campaign itself, sufficiently motivates municipal officials. Moreover, this seems like a better deal for Microsoft in comparison to past initiatives, like the one with the city of Hangzhou that I questioned last year.

Aside from the Black Screen of Death debacle, I really like what I’m seeing from Microsoft on the IP side these days. They’ve really come a long way in the past ten years.