Josh over at WindowsConnected reports that an illegal Key Management Service (KMS) server has popped:

The business launch of Windows Vista is only a few days behind us and already the attempts to pirate Windows Vista are underway. Recently I stumbled on news of a rogue KMS servers that has appeared on the internet with information on how to activate a copy of Windows Vista VL against the server. Once activated your illegal copy of Windows Vista will be good for 180 days before it needs to talk to the KMS server again.

KMS, which stands for Key Management Service, is part of the Volume Activation 2.0 scheme to protect Windows Vista and Longhorn Server from piracy. As part of your license agreement with Microsoft you agree to not bring up a KMS server on the public internet. This server is a clear violation of that agreement, which I doubt they had.

To complicate matters this server appears to be setup somewhere in China. Which I assume would make things a little difficult for Microsoft from both a political and technical standpoint. The domain name which is registered to Shenzhen COMEXE Communication Technology Co. Ltd. has a history of shady activity. It was a domain name that a variant of a recent zero-day bug in word was trying to communicate with. Coincidence? Unlikely!

Well, Vista will be pirated to the same extent as XP, without question. The issue at hand is the leaked keys. It's simply not possible for any corporation of size to keep all of their keys under wraps, and if Microsoft thinks that corporations are going to jump through a lot of hoops to re-key a large number of machines because of one disgruntled employee, they are kidding themselves. They already aren't terribly popular with IT departments that now MUST put up dedicated resources, time and personnel just to bow to Microsoft volume licensing demands. If Microsoft then comes back and says "you have to re-key five thousand workstations because the key was leaked and we're disabling them", I'm guessing the response won't be terribly friendly.