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Cheap Copies: A Risky Bargain



 
 
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Old July 25th 04, 04:18 AM
Ablang
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Default Cheap Copies: A Risky Bargain

Cheap Copies: A Risky Bargain

Software industry rallies against pirate sites selling 'backup' copies of
programs.

Mark S. Sullivan, Medill News Service
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Windows XP for fifty dollars? Yes, it is too good to be true; in
fact, it's so good it's criminal.

A growing number of online piracy operations are selling cheap copies of
software, calling them "backup" copies in an attempt to circumvent copyright
law.

"This is probably the fastest-growing means of pirating software; it's becoming
a serious problem," says Keith Kupferschmid, the Software and Information
Industry Association's vice president of intellectual property policy and
enforcement.


Industry Annoyed
While the wording of the copyright law provides no actual legal shield for
these software resellers, the commerce sites have proliferated. From October
2003 through May 2004, the SIIA tracked 163 operations that purport to sell CDs
of backup versions of software. Two-thirds of the domain names were registered
within the previous eight months.

Copyright law permits "the owner of a copy of a computer program to
make...another copy." This is the language the sites' proprietors claim allows
them to make copies of various software products and sell them to consumers who
already own a license of the software. But nothing indicates the sellers verify
that their customers already have a license for the software for which they
seek a "backup copy." The buyers are actually seeking software on the cheap,
industry groups say.

Most backup sites also offer pirated service packs and updates for the
applications they sell, in an attempt to bypass any need for legitimate license
agreement with the software publisher, according to the SIIA.

"The copyright law is being misused to disguise software piracy," Kupferschmid
says. The SIIA has been actively monitoring backup sites for the past 14
months.

The Business Software Alliance, a software manufacturers' advocacy group, has
sued some of the sites for copyright violation and piracy. However, many of the
sites originate overseas and are difficult to prosecute.

The Department of Justice declines to comment on any ongoing investigations of
the backup sites, although it too has sued pirates in the past.


Spotting the Seller
Backup sites are often nondescript, yet appear respectable enough in design so
as not to arouse suspicion. Web shoppers might be willing to provide a credit
card number without much worry--especially if they're tempted by the low price
of the software.

The sites do, however, make it clear that none of the retail packaging and
literature is shipped with the copies, and that the software cannot be
registered with the company that published it. Software vendors note that this
is a clue to its illegitimacy.

Some backup sites not only provide the specific application, but also a serial
number or crack (a small application that deactivates the software's copyright
protection mechanism), according to the SIIA.

One thing you will not see on many of these sites is a phone number to contact
the seller. A proper privacy statement is likely to be missing as well.


Trends and Workarounds
A recent study by the BSA shows surprisingly high levels of pirated software in
the United States and around the world. Researchers find 36 percent of the
software installed on computers worldwide in 2003 was pirated, representing a
loss of nearly $29 billion to the industry. The study finds 22 percent of
software used in the United States is pirated.

The backup copy scheme is just one of many forms of piracy that have
contributed to those numbers, the BSA says. Another emerging piracy scheme is
the so-called OEM sites, which also sell cheap software copies with no
packaging or product literature.

"Original equipment manufacturer" copies are the discs you get when you buy a
new computer--CD copies of the various software applications already preloaded
onto the machine.

Software publishers send these copies to computer distributors expressly for
distribution with new hardware. Kupferschmid says distributors often end up
with a surplus of these CDs, and some break the copyright by selling the CDs
either to other distributors or to OEM sites.

By doing so, the OEM site is not overtly violating the criminal law, but is
clearly violating the OEM contract between the software publisher and the
hardware distributor. The contract stipulates the OEM software is not to be
sold independent of the hardware it's installed on.


http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/...071504X,00.asp


==
"No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as
necessary to our happiness as realities." -- Christian Nestell Bovee
 




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