In what the U.S. authorities have called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have seized the Web site Megaupload and charged seven people connected with it with running an international enterprise based on Internet piracy.
Megaupload, one of the most popular so-called locker services on the Internet, allowed users to transfer large files like movies and music anonymously. Media companies have long accused it of abetting copyright infringement on a vast scale. In a grand jury indictment, Megaupload is accused of causing $500 million in damages to copyright owners and of making $175 million by selling ads and premium subscriptions.
Four of the seven people, including the site’s founder, Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz), were arrested Friday in New Zealand; the three others remain at large. Each of the seven people — who the indictment said were members of a criminal group it called Mega Conspiracy — is charged with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. The charges could result in more than 20 years in prison.
As part of the crackdown, about 20 search warrants were executed in the United States and in eight other countries, including New Zealand. About $50 million in assets were also seized, as well as a number of servers and 18 domain names that formed Megaupload’s network of file-sharing sites.
The police arrived at Dotcom Mansion in Auckland on Friday morning in two helicopters. Mr. Dotcom, a 37-year-old with dual Finnish and German citizenship, retreated into a safe room, and the police had to cut their way in. He was eventually arrested with a firearm close by that the police said appeared to be a shortened shotgun.
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Earlier this week, it was found that employees of major copyright holders Sony, Universal, and Fox were all found to have illegally downloaded content through the BitTorrent network.
Today, two prominent figures in the online piracy fight were also found to be seemingly undoing all of their employers’ hard work in the fight against online piracy.
Perhaps it just goes to prove that everybody pirates?
The Recording Industry of America (RIAA) is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Hollywood, working on behalf of the record industry. It’s also one of the main proponents behind SOPA, the controversial anti-piracy act currently working its way through Congress.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does what it says on the tin. Part of its remit is to seize domain names controlled or managed by the U.S. government or U.S.-based firms to crack down on online piracy.
It would therefore be highly ironic should one find that employees of both the RIAA and the Dept. of Homeland Security should be found to be illegally downloading copyrighted material through peer-to-peer networks.
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Global software piracy reached a record figure of $59 billion last year, a new study from the Business Software Alliance has found.
That figure represents a 14 percent increase compared with 2009 and a doubling since 2003, the trade group said today. Forty-two percent of PC software was pirated worldwide last year, the group added, down one point from the previous year.
“The software industry is being robbed blind,” BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said in a statement. “Nearly $59 billion worth of products were stolen last year–and the rates of theft are completely out of control in the world’s fastest-growing markets.”
The Business Software Alliance operates on behalf of the software industry. Its members include Adobe Systems, Apple, Microsoft, and Symantec.
Emerging markets are the most troublesome for software makers, with the majority of all software piracy–$32 billion worth–occurring in those markets. In 2010, the BSA said, 50 percent of all PCs shipped around the world went to emerging markets. However, less than 20 percent of all paid software license revenue came from those areas.
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The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) recently released the results of its review of “notorious markets.” The results identify marketplaces both online and in various locations associated with counterfeiting and piracy enforcement actions.
The notorious markets include the Web site Baidu, which was recently ranked the number one most visited site in China and is among the top ten sites in the world. The site contains links to online locations that contain counterfeit or copyright-infringed items.
According to the press release that accompanied the release of the report:
“Piracy and counterfeiting undermine the innovation and creativity that is vital to our global competitiveness. These notorious markets not only hurt American workers and businesses, but are threats to entrepreneurs and industries around the world,” said United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk. “The review we are announcing today shines a light on examples of many offending markets, and highlights an opportunity to work together with our trading partners to curb illicit trade and expand legitimate commerce in creative and innovative industries.”
Among the notorious markets that have brick and mortar locations is the Silk Market in Beijing.
The USTR and the U.S. government are consulting U.S. trading partners to crack down on counterfeiting and piracy. One such plan with the government of Ukraine was recently announced with the intention of acting against mp3 sites.
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More than 26 million pieces of pirated and illegal publications were destroyed across China on Friday to mark the World Intellectual Property Day on April 26, a sign of the country’s determination to protect intellectual property rights (IPR).
Pirated discs and books as well as unauthorized newspapers and periodicals were destroyed on Friday after being confiscated by authorities in all 31 province-level regions on the Chinese mainland.
Authorities will further crack down on piracy and focus on illegal printing houses and disc production lines, said Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of the State Press and Publication Administration and of the National Copyright Administration.
In Yunnan Province, anti-piracy authorities targeted their campaigns to areas nearby schools. Pornographic discs, books and pirated software were confiscated, said Yang Wenhu, head of the provincial Press and Publication Bureau.
Online piracy is a recent development, so Hainan Province targeted its campaign not only toward illegal publications but also to pirated content available online, said Wang Yangjun, deputy secretary general of Hainan provincial government.
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Software piracy may not be quite as disruptive as the high seas kind, but it’s certainly more widespread. With this week’s launch of the Mac App Store, it was only a matter of time before the something-for-nothing crowd figured out a way to bypass Apple’s restrictions. But is the so-called hack currently making the rounds really a flaw in the system, or just human error?
Apple provides a system for developers to prevent piracy of their applications: When an app is launched, it checks to see that it’s authorized do so on the computer — if not, the user will then be prompted to enter the Apple ID and password that were used to buy the app. This process is called ‘receipt validation’ and it works much as security does in a brick-and-mortar retail store, by checking to make sure you have a receipt before you walk out the door with merchandise.
The problem is, while Apple has created this system, it’s incumbent upon the developers to remember to implement it in their own application. Some developers don’t, and that’s where the risk of piracy comes in.
According to the supposed hack, you can get applications purchased by other users to run on your Mac by deleting certain files inside the application’s package and replacing them with files from an app that you’ve legitimately downloaded — it doesn’t even have to be a paid app. The example that’s making the rounds uses the files from Twitter, a free download, and inserts them into the application package for the popular game Angry Birds, a $5 purchase.
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Microsoft Corp. spent $1.85 million in the second quarter to lobby the federal government on software piracy, technology in health care and other issues, according to a disclosure report.
That’s slightly less than the $1.89 million the software maker spent in the second quarter of last year.
The breadth of Microsoft’s business is reflected in the diverse issues tackled by the company’s lobbyists during the quarter. Microsoft also lobbied the federal government on legislation involving China’s Internet policy, patent reform and visas for foreign workers, among other topics, according to the report filed July 16.
As the world’s largest software company, Microsoft is continually going up against software pirates and companies it says infringe on its patented technology. The company lobbied the government on piracy in China in particular.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft may also benefit from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, one of the bills it lobbied on, and other proposals that address electronic medical records. Microsoft has a health care division with products that help hospitals integrate data from different sources to get a complete picture of a patient’s medical history and care. The company also lobbied on privacy issues related to its HealthVault system, which consumers can use to store their own medical information.
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Microsoft Corp.’s Donal Keating uses a custom-built microscope to take 72 high-resolution images of a counterfeit software disc at a Dublin, Ireland, crime lab.
Just as crime-scene investigators on TV’s “CSI” use ballistics to match bullets to a suspect’s gun, Keating will use the abrasions and grooves on the stacking ring, a raised ridge around the disc’s center, to match it to other fakes.
Keating, the company’s senior forensics manager, will then try to trace the counterfeit disc to the factory and the crime syndicate that produced it.
The probing is part of a campaign by the world’s largest softwaremaker to vanquish counterfeiters. Microsoft employs 75 investigators, lawyers and analysts – many with experience in narcotics and Mafia cases – in nine labs around the world. They’re armed with maps that help pinpoint where suspect products are bought or seized by law enforcement, software that identifies digital fingerprints on discs, and a program that scours the Web for downloadable fakes.
Counterfeiting, which is high in emerging markets such as China and India, probably costs the software industry about $10 billion a year in lost revenue, said John Gantz, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC who puts together an annual report on worldwide piracy. Microsoft facsimiles probably represent most of that, he said.
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College and universities that don’t do enough to keep students from illegally sharing movies and music could lose federal funding.
A provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 is making schools a reluctant ally in the entertainment industry’s campaign to stamp out illegal file sharing.
Colleges and universities must put in place plans “to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution’s network” without hampering legitimate educational and research use, according to regulations that went into effect Thursday.
Tennessee handled this well in advance of the new law, universities’ information technology officials say. The state’s Higher Education Commission required all of them to file reports last year that outlined what they were doing to combat piracy.
At Middle Tennessee State University, for example, the wireless system scans each computer for peer-to-peer software before allowing it access to the Internet. If it finds any, a message pops up explaining that the user will have to remove the software before continuing. As a failsafe measure, MTSU system checks files being transferred over its system, looking for markers of illegal file sharing, and shuts down access to any user doing it.
“You get a screen that says you’re running peer-to-peer software, if you do a removal of the software, you can get back on the network,” said Greg Schaffer, assistant vice president for network and information technology security. “The system remembers them. The next time, the system says, ‘This is your second time. If you get caught again, you will go through a judicial process to get access.’”
The university also nudges students toward legal sites such as iTunes, a requirement of the new law, he said.
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It’s World Cup season and Mondial fever will probably put a lot of regional conflicts on the back burner for the next month – not to mention put a dent in a lot of family budgets (husbands buying the latest 60 inch Sony Bravia and wives on retail therapy while the guys are watching football)
I wanted to write a review of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa video game (it would have been a great excuse for my wife) but I don’t have the right platform – I use Ubuntu and I have neither an Xbox 360 nor a Playstation 3.
It’s ironic that the South African World cup game doesn’t run on Ubuntu. It would have been a huge marketing coup and poetic justice if the game software was released for Ubuntu in a GPL license.
That got me thinking about open source licensing and it’s advantages for developing countries, which really got my hackles up after reading the Seventh Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study – that screams: Software Theft Remains Significant Issue Around the World
The rate of global software piracy climbed to 43 percent in 2009. This increase was fueled in large part by expanding PC sales in fast-growing, high-piracy countries and increasing sales to consumers — two market segments that traditionally have higher incidents of software theft. In 2009, for every $100 worth of legitimate software sold, an additional $75 worth of unlicensed software made its way onto the market. There was some progress in 2009 — software rates actually dropped in almost half of the countries examined in this year’s study.
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Insisting that software piracy in China has become so pervasive that “there is no software market to speak of” in the fast-growing country, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said yesterday that enhanced enforcement in China of intellectual-property rules could save U.S. firms tens of thousands of jobs, Bloomberg reports.
From a news article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek:
China’s trade surplus with the U.S. widened in March, fuelling concern the yuan has been kept undervalued to support Chinese exports.
Better enforcement of intellectual property rules could save U.S. firms tens of thousands of jobs, Ballmer said.
“If the U.S. is going to export to Asia, it’s going to export IP, whether it’s in pharmaceuticals, technology,” Ballmer said. “Otherwise the U.S. will have nothing to export.”
Employee mobility necessitates building a strategy to protect corporate assets
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Expanding PC sales in emerging market is increasing the rate of software piracy, according to a recent study by the Business Software Alliance, an industry-backed anti-piracy group.
The rate of global software piracy in 2009 was 43%, meaning that for every $100 worth of legitimate software sold in 2009, an additional $75 worth of unlicensed software also made its way into the market, according to a recent study by the BSA and market research firm IDC. This is a 2-percentage-point increase from 2008, and is fueled largely by expanding PC sales in emerging markets, the study found.
Software theft exceeded $51 billion in commercial value in 2009, according to the BSA. IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into “ailing economies.”
Despite the uptick, 2009 piracy rates are better than expected, according to BSA. Still, “Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products,” said BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman, in a statement.
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