Under the settlement, France-headquartered MPO Group has admitted it was a very naughty boy by breaching the replication agreements it had in place with Redmond.

A Microsoft anti-piracy investigation in 2003 traced dodgy copies of Exchange and SQL Server they had seized back to MPO Group's Thai subsidiary. MPO said it had made the disks on the basis of license documents from a third party which turned out to be forgeries.

According to Microsoft this had to be a whopper, since it does not operate that kind of license scheme. Once MPO realised this, it cooperated with Microsoft in the worldwide hunt for the counterfeit disks, which are still turning up in the supply chain.