PC manufacturers used to trick BIOS copyright strings to get full editions of trial software

You may have noticed that when you purchase a new PC, it comes with certain software pre-installed. Sometimes, when you open this software, it activates, and you receive the full version of it without paying any additional cost. This is because that PC's manufacturer is a licensee of that software and the fact that a customer gets the full version of a trial software for free serves as a perk for potential buyers. However, many PC manufacturers tried to trick this process in its infancy.

During the days of Windows 95, when the Plug and Play specification was still in development, the OS' engineering team was trying to figure out ways through which it could identify PCs that existed prior to the inception of this specification. To that end, one of the methods they tried was searching for copyright strings and firmware dates in the BIOS.

Through the course of this investigation, they discovered a rather oddly named copyright string "Not Copyright Fabrikam Computer" in a PC that was actually manufactured by Contoso. In this case, both Fabrikam and Contoso are fictional names that are used to describe this scenario without revealing the actual identity of the OEMs involved.

Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen explains in a blog post that these odd copyright strings were actually appearing because Contoso PCs contained a trial version of a software and the company wanted the full version to be activated for customers even though it was not an official licensee. In order to bypass the costly licensing process, what the firm did was that it added the following text to its copyright string: "Copyright Contoso Not Copyright Fabrikam Computer". The trial version of said software would search for the string "Copyright Fabrikam Computer" and end up finding it within the substring of the convoluted copyright string mentioned above, accidentally activating the software's full version.

While more robust ways were adopted later to avoid this problem, it's certainly interesting to see that OEMs would go to this length in order to distribute software that they are not officially allowed to. Well, as they say, the past stays in the past.