Piracy

Overheard: Pirates of perchance

The only real limitation on your copying was the number of floppy disks you could afford! Graham Pockett, Why I Started CFS (or “Confessions Of A Software Pirate”)

According to the Business Software Alliance’s fifth-annual study on global software piracy, softlifting is still a big problem — especially in “emerging markets.” It makes sense to me. Back in the day, a lot of us were pirates of perchance — as in “perchance we can get this program for free from a friend.”

We used to call it Warez.

Interestingly enough, can you guess what software apps the BSA says are lifted most? Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus, Adobe Acrobat, and Symantec’s PC Anywhere.

Overheard: Operation Cisco Raider

Counterfeit network hardware entering the marketplace raises significant public safety concerns and must be stopped…It is critically important that network administrators in both private sector and government perform due diligence in order to prevent counterfeit hardware from being installed on their networks. Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher, as quoted in Progress Reported Against Traffickers in Counterfeit Network Hardware

Over the last 2 years, Operation Cisco Raider has resulted in 36 search warrants that identified approximately 3,500 counterfeit network components with an estimated retail value of over $3.5 million, and has led to a total of ten convictions and $1.7 million in restitution.

Overheard: ISPs are not the Internet police

The industry’s trade body, the ISPA, has spent months in discussions with music and movie companies about ways of preventing illegal filesharing, but buoyed by recent success in France, the major record labels and Hollywood studios have lobbied the government hard for faster action. Richard Wray, Filesharing law ‘unworkable’

If you asked yourself “What recent success in France?” like I did, here you go.  Short version? There are less than a dozen ISPs in France. All the stakeholders got together and agreed that service providers in France will issue warning messages to customers who are downloading files illegally — and if the customer ignores the message, he loses Internet access.  An independent authority, supervised by a judge, will be in charge.  

Overheard: Piracy hurting open source movement in China

In China, the open-source movement is having a harder time gaining traction because of widespread software piracy. With pirated copies of Windows XP or Vista selling on the street for less than $2, there is little economic incentive for Chinese Internet users to download Firefox. Bill Xu, founder of the ZEUUX Free Software Community, a Beijing group that promotes open source, points out that for Firefox to succeed in China, it shouldn’t compete on cost but by stressing its security features. Chi-Chu Tschang, Mozilla Takes on Microsoft in China