Microsoft: £5 Office rental breaks our licence

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 8 Feb 2008 at 17:00

Microsoft has accused Fasthosts of breaching its licensing regulations by offering Office 2007 to rent over the internet.

Earlier this week the web host announced it was offering Office on-demand for as little as £5 per month.

The company had briefed PC Pro that the software would be usable offline, but just a day before the service was launched it decided that customers must remain online whilst they used the software.

Now Microsoft claims the entire offer is off limits. "At present, streaming Microsoft products like Office 2007 via the web infringes our license regulations," says Michala Wardell, head of anti-piracy at Microsoft UK. "Fasthosts has been informed of this and we are currently working with it to rectify this situation."

Confusingly, the package offered by Fasthosts isn't really streamed at all. The full version of Office is downloaded on to the customer's PC, but they have to maintain an open internet connection to run the software.

"Long-standing agreement"

Fasthosts denies any wrongdoing. "Fasthosts launched its Office 2007 streaming service this month after having worked with its software industry streaming partners over a period of several months, since last year," a company statement reads.

"Fasthosts went live with this service in the knowledge that such an offering would be compatible with the SPLA [Microsoft Service Provider Licence Agreement] after it was confirmed, via its streaming partners, that approval had been made by Microsoft for such services to be streamed under the SPLA.

"Fasthosts has understood, and has had confirmed to it, that the facilitation of this approval is through the production of an addendum to the current SPLA, a decision confirmed in meetings between Microsoft European SPLA Division and a Fasthosts' software streaming partner in January of this year.

"Fasthosts and Fasthosts' partners have therefore worked with the European and Worldwide SPLA teams in getting approval for this service prior to launch, in order to bring this innovative new offering to market.

"Fasthosts has not been contacted by anyone from the Microsoft Anti-Piracy team."

Defiant response

At the time of publication, Fasthosts was continuing to offer Office for download. And the company says it's not intending to stop there, either. "Fasthosts will shortly launch its offline mode for Fasthosts MS Office software, which will allow users to utilise their software offline, with only the occasional need to validate the software by connecting to the internet.

"This feature is currently being tested and should be released by the end of the month," the company claims.