welcome to the world of intellectual property as a whole. Nowhere does anyone EVER say that you "own" windows, or any other software. You "license" it from the copyright holder.

Software isn't a tangible physical good. You own the CD media that your os came on, and the few cents worth value that that has. You license the right to actually use the information on the CD.

In the case of Joker-R's problem, he's running into the fact that he's violating the license agreement (by installing on multiple computers at the same time). But I think he gave up a solid 2 and a half weeks ago, when he realized that nobody here was forthcoming with an easy way to break winxp's product activation, so I guess it's a moot point either way.