Internet In Asia

Hollywood Aims to Block RealNetworks' DVD Software

2008-10-02T07:19:00.000-07:00

Hollywood's six major movie studios on Tuesday sued RealNetworks Inc. to prevent it from distributing DVD copying software that they said would allow consumers to "rent, rip and return" movies or even copy friends' DVD collections outright.

The studios stand to lose key revenue from the sale of DVDs, estimated by Adams Media Research at $15 billion in the U.S. this year, if consumers stop buying DVDs and instead copy rental discs from outlets like Netflix and Blockbuster.

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Nigeria: Piracy - Robber of Intellectual Property

2008-08-29T05:21:00.000-07:00

While piracy accounts for almost 7% of all global trade, Nigeria accounts for 80% of the pirated international music CDs. In this illustrative essay, Michael Dibie captures the damaging effect of piracy on global trade.

Nigeria's status as a favourable destination for foreign direct investment as well as a place where local creative talent can flourish is in jeopardy. No thanks to the activities of criminals that place no value on intellectual property (IP). That was the alarming message from a panel of experts who debated the enforcement of IP rights at the opening day of the CTO business and technology summit in Lagos recently.

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Organised crime syndicates move into DVD, internet piracy

2008-08-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

ORGANISED crime syndicates including bikie gangs have moved into DVD and internet piracy, with some channelling millions of dollars in illicit profits into drug dealing ventures.

They are making their money off the back of movies like The Dark Knight, of which pirated DVDs have already been seized in Australia, and locally funded film The Bank Job, which was on DVD in Australia before its release on the big screen.

Australia is now second only to China in the Asia-Pacific region for the number of pirated DVDs seized, according to the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

Neil Gann, AFACT director of operations, told The Daily Telegraph the growing sophistication of the pirate industry meant the big players were taking over from computer geeks and "mum-and-dad" operations.

More than $233 million a year was being stolen from the country's film industry - including video hire stores and suburban cinemas - and ending up in the pockets of criminals.

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IOC official praises China anti-piracy efforts

2008-08-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

BEIJING, Aug. 21 (Xinhua) -- Hain Verbruggen, chairman of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Coordination Commission for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, praised China's anti-piracy efforts against illegal broadcasts of the events on Thursday, calling them efficient.

In a meeting with Liu Binjie, general director of China's General Administration of Press and Publication, Verbruggen said according to the IOC's automatic monitoring system, the illegal broadcasting of Olympic-related content occurring in the country had all been stopped rapidly and efficiently.

"The anti-piracy efforts of the Chinese government set a good example for the global anti-piracy work for the Olympics," said Verbruggen.

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Bill Gates predicts software revolution

2008-08-15T07:03:00.001-07:00

Bill Gates, chairman, co-founder and former head of Microsoft, has predicted that continual expansion of Internet services will provoke a revolution in software development.

During a visit to Hong Kong, Gates attended a forum on August 12 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Microsoft Research Asia, the company's regional research lab, which was founded in 1998 in Beijing, and has provided training for more than 2,000 interns from universities in the region.

This was Gate's first official speech in public after he stepped down as Microsoft Chief Executive in July 2008 to move to a full-time philanthropist role at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Canadian music mogul takes on China, pirates welcome

2008-07-22T10:42:00.001-07:00

Terry McBride, the Canadian best known as the manager of pop megastar Avril Lavigne said the music industry's obsession with stemming the flow of illegally downloaded material is futile and short-sighted.

"I do not believe that the record label owns the song, the publisher does not own the song, even the artist does not own the song," McBride told AFP in an interview.

"It is the emotion that a fan attaches to that song, to that lyric that makes it popular. What the record business needs to do is to monetise the behaviour of that fan."

McBride said record companies need an alternative to what he sees as an outmoded business model that relies on a few mega-selling artists and copyright protection.

In almost every global market record sales are plummetting as people turn to the Internet for music, increasingly downloading it for free.

A recent survey by MTV of consumers in 12 Asian countries found that 77 percent of people aged between 15 and 24 had illegally downloaded music in the past month, while 59 percent had also made legitimate purchases.

The rampant piracy -- particularly serious in China where the rate of illegal downloading was put at more than 80 percent, which some see as conservative -- has led to aggressive legal action.

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Apple Struggles to Win Fans in China

2008-07-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

Yang Weiguo, a 20-year-old university student in Beijing, is a committed Apple (AAPL) fan. Given the American company's limited presence in China, that's no small achievement. In April, for instance, Yang bought a new Macbook through MacX.cn, a fan site for Mac users in China that operates an online store unaffiliated with the company. The online store had someone buy a computer for Yang in Hong Kong and courier it up to Beijing, saving him $293, or roughly 17%, on his Macbook purchase.

So when Yang, who is spending his summer as a volunteer for the Olympics next month, found out through the Mac community that Apple would open its first store in China on July 19, he knew he had to be there from the beginning. He arrived at the shop, located in a swank shopping mall in the Sanlitun area of Beijing, 22 hours before it was scheduled to open. He was among more than 100 others who camped overnight -- even though he already had his Macbook and wasn't interested in a new iPod. "I don't have anything I need to buy," he says. Still, because he wanted to be there, Yang spent $26 for an adapter cable he could have easily purchased elsewhere.

Smuggling Challenge Apple executives want to make it easier to convert more people like Yang from the cult of Mao to the cult of Mac. Apple plans to open a second store in Beijing in 2009 and another in Shanghai later. "We expect to be successful here in China because the entire economy is growing," says Ron Johnson, Apple's senior vice-president for retail.

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Videogame creator calls for ‘free games’ to beat piracy

2008-07-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

According to renowned game designer Dave Perry, the best way to beat piracy within the videogame industry is to not cram masses of software protection on each and every disc… but to give the games to consumers for free.

Speaking in Belfast after receiving an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University for his pioneering contribution to computer and videogame development, the creator of ‘Earthworm Jim’, ‘MDK’ and ‘Enter the Matrix pointed to the Asian market as proof that such an approach can work.

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Four GTA businesses nabbed in anti-piracy software sting

2008-04-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

You can try to run illegal software, but according to the Business Software Alliance, you can't hide.

The BSA announced that four GTA-based companies have paid a combined total of $95,000 in fines after it was discovered they had unlicensed software from Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft running on its computers.

“Companies should establish proper software asset management policies and procedures in the first place rather than to risk paying damages for unlicensed software use down the road,” said BSA chariman Michael Murphy.

“These settlements demonstrate that even well-managed organizations need to pay careful attention to software licensing requirements. The cost of doing otherwise may be very high.”

read more here...

Microsoft Renews Anti-Piracy Drive, Launches New Web Site

2007-11-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

Washington (AHN) - A new web site providing information on how customers can tell whether a software is genuine or not underscores a renewed drive by Microsoft to stop pirated versions of its Windows products.

The web site, launched Wednesday, tell consumers about suspicious packaging and other signs of a pirated or fake copies of Windows or other Microsoft software.

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An open letter to the RIAA

2007-10-12T05:49:00.000-07:00

Posted by Don Reisinger

Dear RIAA,

As the watchdog for the so-called "recording industry," I expect you to preserve and protect the viability and future growth of the recording industry. In fact, I don't even have a problem with you doing that. But sad as it as, your tactics have come under attack by those on both sides of the "piracy" fence imploring you to find something better to do with your time. Isn't it time you listen to your critics and realize that your tactics are making you one of the most hated organizations in the world?

read the rest here

How can you stop it

2007-07-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

when it seems to be their way of life, rip the rest of the world off:

Semiconductor maker Microchip Technology sues Chinese company for alleged piracy

SHANGHAI, China: Semiconductor maker Microchip Technology Inc. said Wednesday that it is suing a Chinese manufacturer for alleged illegal copying of its microcode and other proproprietary information.

Chandler, Arizona-based Microchip said it filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Shanghai Haier Integrated Circuit Co. in Shanghai's No. 1 Intermediate People's Court.

Details about the lawsuit or any damages sought were not immediately available

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Piracy Crippling Burma’s Music Industry

2007-06-29T05:44:00.000-07:00

Piracy in Burma has brought the country’s music industry to its knees, according to performers and music producers, who say they can no longer compete with the stream of cheap copies of CDs and VCDs.

“Piracy drives the industry into absolute paralysis,” well-known songwriter Maung Thit Min told The Irrawaddy. “We used to discuss intellectual property laws under the World Intellectual Property Organization, but nothing has been done to follow these guidelines.”

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Extradited piracy leader sentenced to 51 months

2007-06-26T04:22:00.000-07:00

Hew Raymond Griffiths, a 44-year-old British national living in Australia and leader of one of the oldest and most widely recognized Internet software piracy groups in the 90s called DrinkOrDie, was extradited to the U.S. in February and sentenced this past Friday to 51 months in prison on one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.

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More about drink or die

Hostel II director blames piracy for poor box office sales

2007-06-20T05:26:00.000-07:00

Director Eli Roth is speaking out about the lackluster box-office for his latest film, Hostel: Part II, and he's blaming everyone but himself. Roth puts piracy front and center as the reason for the film's performance. "Piracy has become worse than ever now, and a stolen workprint (with unfinished music, no sound effects, and no VFX) leaked out on online before the release, and is really hurting us, especially internationally," he says, before going on to specifically tear into critics who reviewed a leaked copy of the film.

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Weapon against piracy

2007-06-19T04:42:00.000-07:00

One of the most ubiquitous scenes that you will observe outside many railway stations in Mumbai is of people selling pirated CDs and DVDs. Nowadays, it's become very easy for anybody to create such multiple copies (and sell them) even without having any appropriate right to do so. It's illegal and it is causing huge losses to the companies producing the original versions.

Yes, there are copyright laws. But, these laws are inadequate to stop or control the distribution of digital content through media devices or the Internet. This is where Software Digital Rights Management (DRM) comes into the picture. "The only way to stop software piracy is to protect software from unauthorised use. And this can be done through DRM," says Shailendra Sahasrabudhe, Country Manager, Aladdin Knowledge Systems – a global major in this industry.

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NBC wants government crackdown on piracy

2007-06-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

NBC Universal has told America's communications regulator, the FCC, that the US government needs to do more to encourage the removal of pirated content from the internet.

The FCC is currently taking comments in relation to net neutrality over fears that ISPs and telecom providers could seek to block or downgrade the delivery to subscribers of certain applications and or content from competitors. NBC used its filing on the topic to address the issue of the piracy of intellectual property.

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Piracy more dangerous than bank robbing

2007-06-18T04:14:00.000-07:00

NBC'S top lawyer, Rick Cotton, has said that too much money was spent defending society from bank robbers, fraud and burglary.
Cotton said that policing money should be spent doing more about piracy instead.

He said that law enforcement resources were "seriously misaligned". If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, it only costs the country $16 billion a year.

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Sounds a little far-fetched to me...ed.

China, US to step up anti-piracy work

2007-06-18T04:08:00.000-07:00

China has promised to pursue product pirates identified by US authorities in a new effort to stamp out counterfeit products, the head of the US customs agency said Friday.

Under a memorandum of cooperation signed this week, US Customs will provide China with information on the source of seized goods, and Beijing will report back within 90 days on the status of efforts to track down the counterfeiters, Basham told reporters.

"We've got to start dealing with the source of the problem. We can't expect to rely upon interdiction to be our tool in order to stop these products," Basham said.

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Software piracy widespread in Azerbaijan, says ICT minister

2007-06-07T04:21:00.000-07:00

“Software piracy is widespread in Azerbaijan. The piracy is around 21-23% in the United States while the level is 93-95% in our country. We have therefore decided to frame legal framework for intellectual property and software use,” said Ali Abbasov, the country’s communications and information technologies minister.

He added that the first move will come to license software used in computers of the government bodies.

“The government will control the process. The schools are provided with licensed software at present within the scope of the government program to computerize education institutions,” he underscored.

Hey, what and where the heck is Azerbaijan?

Hitachi, Oracle jointly fight piracy in China

2007-06-05T04:03:00.000-07:00

Japanese electronics group Hitachi and U.S. software firm Oracle Corp. plan to jointly market wireless tags that help to identify counterfeit goods in China, the Nikkei business daily said on Sunday.

Hitachi and Oracle will market the IC, or integrated circuit, tags for a wide range of products, including cash vouchers, luxury items and home appliances, the Nikkei said. IC tags are tiny chips that can store basic information about a product such as where it was produced and by which company.

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Pirated products valued at $200 billion

2007-06-05T04:00:00.000-07:00

The value of global counterfeited goods traded in 2005 was at least 200 billion dollars (148 billion euros) and could be several hundred billion dollars more, the Paris-based OECD estimated on Monday.

The multilateral economics body, which has 30 member countries, released details of an 18-month probe into counterfeiting and piracy worldwide that aimed to shed light on the shadowy business of bootlegs and fakes.

The figure of 200 billion dollars, based on international customs data, did not include counterfeit and pirated products that were produced and consumed in the same country, the OECD said

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CD Wow to pay labels $81 million

2007-05-30T10:28:00.000-07:00

p2pnet.net news:-CD Wow has been ordered to pay a Big 4 music cartel 'trade' company some £41 million (today about $80,994,655) for breaking UK import rules.

And downloading wasn't an issue.

"The High Court in London ruled in March that the site's owners, Music Trading Online, were 'in substantial breach' of a 2004 agreement to stop importing CDs," ordering the company to pay "£37m plus interest to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI)," says the BBC.

The story has ceo Henrik Wesslen declaring, "We are the little guys selling CDs to the UK market and they (the BPI) have picked on us for that reason. Other bigger sites doing the same thing have been left alone."

According to The Times Online, CD Wow imported cheap CDs from Hong Kong, "but promised as long ago as 2004 to stop the practice." But earlier in the year it was found guilty of continuing the trade.

"Yesterday CD Wow - a privately held company with little-known British and European founders - said that the BPI was able to cite only 39 instances of the rules being breached, a fraction of the 10,000 CDs it ships a day," says the story.

But, "CD-Wow is no consumer champion," stated the BPI's Geoff Taylor, says the BBC.

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Lobbyist Urges Income From Karaoke

2007-05-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

HONG KONG — The music industry needs to obtain more revenue from karaoke royalties and radio stations in China to offset losses to piracy, the head of an industry association said Wednesday.

"The new business model is built on the diversification of revenue streams," IFPI chief executive John Kennedy said at a music industry conference in Hong Kong.

Revenue from CD sales still represents a big chunk of the industry's overall earnings, but its share is decreasing, and record companies need to branch out into digital music, radio and karaoke royalties, especially in China, Kennedy said.

London-based IFPI, which represents the recording industry worldwide, estimates that sales of pirated music products worldwide were worth $4.5 billion in 2005 and that nearly 20 billion songs were illegally downloaded that year.

China is a serious offender, with pirated CDs or tapes accounting for more than 85 percent of the market, according to IFPI.

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Microsoft signs software deal with Vietnam

2007-05-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

HANOI -- US software giant Microsoft Monday signed an agreement with communist Vietnam to use its licensed programs in government desktop computers in a bid to reduce rampant software piracy.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung on a one-day visit during which both witnessed the signing of the agreement with the post and telematics ministry to use genuine Microsoft software.

Under the deal, Microsoft Office Systems software will be loaded onto 300,000 central and rural government desktops and computers in educational institutions, said a spokesman for Microsoft.

The deal aims to make Vietnam's government compliant with intellectual property (IP) protection rules and to foster a vibrant information and communication technology (ICT) industry, both sides said in a statement.

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Hollywood steps up fight against ‘pirates’ in Asia

2007-05-16T16:09:00.001-07:00

SINGAPORE— Hollywood has stepped up its fight against movie piracy in Asia with the release of an anti-piracy trailer in Singapore.

The 30-second trailer shows a thief, swinging in from a helicopter and dodging lasers, trying to steal a DVD. He is later caught. More than 30 cases of pirated movies, filmed with handheld video cameras in theaters, have been traced to the Asia-Pacific region in the past two years, said Fritz Attaway of the Motion Picture Association

“As we tackle this problem in our cinemas across North America and in Europe, we anticipate that even more will come from the Asia-Pacific region,” Attaway told reporters.

In the last week, the MPA discovered 14 recordings in Malaysia of the new “Spider-Man 3” movie.

Asia: The Steep Cost of Software Piracy

2007-05-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

The overall rate of theft declined in the Asia-Pacific region, but because of increasing computer sales, its even more damaging to revenue

Despite a dip in the overall software piracy rate, increased PC ownership and growing broadband Internet access have pushed up revenue losses due to piracy in Asia.

According to the latest software piracy report released Tuesday by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the average piracy rate in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia and Japan, grew slightly to 55 percent in 2006, compared to 54 percent in 2005. However, estimated revenue losses due to piracy rose sharply by 44 percent to US$11.6 billion last year, compared to US$8.1 billion the year before.

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Mexican piracy ring smashed

2007-05-09T14:36:00.001-07:00

Anti-piracy experts have worked closely with Mexican authorities in executive several search warrants against a freight forwarding company that was a distribution point for pirated music and film product to various cities across Mexico. An investigation was underway for a number of weeks after a seizure of 37,000 pirate CD-Rs in the company's dispatch terminal.

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Principal Guilty in Software Piracy Case

2007-05-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

Russian officials frequently allege that foreign governments, including the U.S., are meddling in Russia's internal affairs, and Russian media reports have portrayed the software piracy case as that of a Western corporation bringing its power to bear on one man -- in this case, a principal who also teaches history and earns $360 a month.

A court Monday found the principal of a village school guilty of using bootleg Microsoft software and ordered him to pay a fine of about $195 in a case that was cast by Russian media as a battle between a humble educator and an international corporation.
The trial of Alexander Ponosov, who was charged with violating intellectual property rights by using classroom computers with pirated versions of the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office software installed, has attracted wide attention.

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Asia West??

2007-05-09T14:32:00.000-07:00

In Bid to Stem Piracy, Warner Bros. Halts Promo Screenings in Canada

Burbank, Calif. - In a move aimed at combating piracy, Warner Bros. Pictures announced on Wednesday that it has cancelled all promotional and word-of-mouth screenings in Canada for all of its forthcoming releases.

The studio said it is responding to Canada's lack of legislation banning the videotaping of films in movie theaters, adding that over the last 18 months, some 70% of its films have been camcorded in Canada.

The practice is illegal in the U.S. under various federal, state and local laws.

"Canada is the number one priority in terms of anti-camcording legislation," said Darcy Antonellis, Warner's senior vice president of worldwide anti-piracy operations.

"Within the first week of a film's release, you can almost be certain that somewhere out there a Canadian copy will show up."

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BSA Steps Up Anti Piracy Drive

2007-05-04T11:36:00.000-07:00

According to reports, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) recently carried out civil enforcement action against Hyderabad-based SM Technologies, and its owner, Suresh Babu Mandava, leading to the seizure of pirated software worth Rs 2 crores approximately.

A total of 1,843 CDs were recovered, allegedly containing pirated software of Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, and Symantec, under various titles, versions, and copies.

This is the second time, in a short span of three years, that the same company has been raided. Earlier, in September 2004, BSA had filed a criminal complaint against the company, and police had raided the premises at three locations in Hyderabad.

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Not exactly asia, but...

2007-05-04T11:34:00.000-07:00

NYC aims tougher law, public plea at piracy

NEW YORK - With the summer blockbuster movie season just ahead, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week signed legislation that upgrades film piracy from a violation with a $250 fine to a misdemeanor that carries up to six months in jail and penalties of up to $5,000.

The stricter law coincides with an advertising campaign against film piracy.

The Motion Picture Association of America says more than 40 percent of bootlegged films are secretly videotaped in New York City theaters. The duplications are typically sold for mass reproduction or posted on the Internet, sometimes just hours after the movie has premiered.

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US put India in "priority watch list"

2007-05-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

India, China, Russia and nine other nations have been targeted by the United States for failing to sufficiently protect American producers of music, movies and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.

The Bush administration on Monday placed the 12 countries on a "priority watch list", which will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions if the administration decides to bring trade cases before the World Trade Organization.

Another 31 countries were placed on lower level monitoring lists, indicating the concerns about copyright violations in those nations did not warrant the highest level of scrutiny.

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U.S. groups say Chinese product piracy rising

2007-04-27T14:52:00.001-07:00

The flood of pirated movies and other goods from China is growing despite increased enforcement, two U.S. business groups said Thursday, appealing to Beijing for tougher action.
Beijing's anti-piracy activity "is either not enough or not of the right kind," the American Chamber of Commerce in China and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said in a report released on International Intellectual Property Day.

Forty percent of companies surveyed said the volume of counterfeiting of their products in China increased, while only 4 percent saw a decline, said the report, an annual review of Chinese business conditions.

Chinese product piracy has worsened tensions with Washington, which filed a World Trade Organization complaint this month accusing Beijing of violating trade commitments by failing to protect copyrights, patents and other intellectual property rights.

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Canada asks to join WTO talks on China piracy

2007-04-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON - Complaining that it, too, is a victim of Chinese piracy, Canada wants to join the United States in complaining about Beijing's lax enforcement of copyright and intellectual property rights.

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Microsoft's China sales up 20%

2007-04-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

Software giant Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it expects its China sales to rise more than 20 percent this year, boosted by new products and a national crackdown on software piracy.

Responding to complaints by Western governments and companies, as well as criticism from a growing number of domestic firms, China has been clamping down on piracy over the last two years to the benefit of software makers such as Microsoft (Charts).

Weak copyright laws in China make it hard to enforce the issue. CNN's John Vause reports. (April 9)

As part of the campaign, most of the nation's top domestic PC sellers, including Lenovo and Founder, have pushed to boost their number of PCs sold with legal copies of Microsoft's Windows operating systems already installed.

Other major foreign players in the market, including global leaders Hewlett-Packard (Charts) and Dell (Charts), are pushing similar policies in China.

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US throws the book at China over piracy

2007-04-10T10:34:00.000-07:00

The US government yesterday announced its intention to file two legal complaints with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against China to stem the high levels of piracy there and tackle limited market access.

US trade representative Susan Schwab said that insufficient protection for intellectual property rights in China has led to losses of billions in sales for US software, music and film companies.

The US government estimates that piracy costs its economy between US$200bn and US$250bn a year, with up to US$24bn lost alone from sales of pirated goods in China.

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Retrial for Microsoft piracy case

2007-03-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

A Russian court has ordered a retrial of a case against a rural head teacher accused of using pirated Microsoft software in his school.
Last month a lower court in Perm, some 1,000km (620 miles) east of Moscow, dismissed the case as "trivial".

But a higher court has ruled it should proceed against Alexander Ponosov after pressure from the prosecution.

The trial has been seen as a response to international pressure to crack down on piracy in Russia.

Industry experts say Russia ranks second only to China in use of illegal computer software and bootlegged music.

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1.6 million pirated DVDs seized

2007-03-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

HONG KONG

Chinese officials seized 1.6 million illegal DVDs in southern China in the country's largest anti-piracy haul of the year, a film industry group said Monday.

The midnight raid on the DVD factory and storage center in the city of Guangzhou turned up pirated versions of Chinese, American, Korean and Japanese movies and TV shows, according to the Motion Picture Association, which said it tipped off the authorities.

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U.S. movie studios win piracy case in China court

2006-12-19T10:13:00.001-08:00

BEIJING: Five U.S. movie studios have won a court case against a Beijing shop accused of selling pirated copies of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and "War of the Worlds" and other titles, the Motion Picture Association said Tuesday.

The Beijing No.2 Intermediate People's Court ruled the Yu Hao Qing DVD store and its parent company, Beijing Century Hai Hong Trading Co. Ltd, were guilty of copyright infringement and ordered them to stop selling pirated moves and pay 164,000 yuan (US$20,100; €15,300) in compensation.

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Microsoft moves to block hybrid Vista

2006-12-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

The software maker said on Thursday that the update is aimed at thwarting a technique that was letting some people use pirated versions of the operating system without going through the software's built-in product activation. Microsoft has dubbed the approach "frankenbuild" because it works by combining test versions of Vista with the final code to create a hybrid version.

"Windows Vista will use the new Windows Update client to require only the 'frankenbuild' systems to go through a genuine validation check," Microsoft said on its Windows Genuine Advantage program blog. "These systems will fail that check because we have blocked the [product] keys for systems not authorised to use them."

Although Vista was only released to businesses last month ? and won't hit retail shelves until late January ? it has been making the rounds on the internet, and there have been several reported hacks to bypass its built-in security mechanisms.

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China signs Web piracy deal with U.S. movie group

2006-12-15T10:45:00.000-08:00

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Friday agreed with the Motion Picture Association of America and other groups to do more to tackle copyright piracy on the Internet, the official Xinhua news agency said. China's National Copyright Administration said the country would investigate and punish those suspected of online intellectual property abuses by the movie association as well as other groups such as the Association of American Publishers.
The Chinese and foreign sides would also keep in close touch with each other and exchange information, Xinhua said.
The Business Software Alliance and Britain's Publishers Association were two other groups that signed the agreement, it added.
Piracy is one of the trade issues that has poisoned trade relations between China and the United States, and has been a focus of two days of talks in Beijing, led on the U.S. side by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

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China announces anti-piracy crackdown

2006-12-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

BEIJING

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confronted mixed signals as he arrived in China Wednesday for trade talks, with Beijing announcing a renewed crackdown on pirated goods but also running up a record trade surplus with the United States.

American officials are trying to downplay expectations of breakthroughs from the talks led by Paulson, Washington's point man on economic ties with Beijing, and Chinese Premier Wu Yi. The talks are billed as the start of a wide-ranging "strategic economic dialogue."

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Music Piracy Crackdown Targets Seventeen Countries

2006-10-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has launched more than 8,000 legal cases against illegal music downloaders across 17 countries in recent weeks. "Consumers today can get music legally in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago ... yet some people continue to consume their music illegally," said IFPI chairman John Kennedy.

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Vietnam fines South Korean Daewoo's affiliate for software piracy

2006-10-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

HANOI, Vietnam Authorities in Vietnam have fined an affiliate of South Korea's Daewoo Corp. for using pirated software, the first time a corporate user of illegal software has been targeted in the Southeast Asian country, officials said Wednesday.

Police and inspectors from the Ministry of Culture and Information raided the Hanoi-based Daewoo Hanel Electronic Corp., last week and discovered all the software installed in their computers was pirated, said Vu Xuan Thanh, the ministry's chief inspector.

The illegal software included copies of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Auto CAD, Thanh said.

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EU says China main focus of new anti-piracy push

2006-10-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

BRUSSELS: China will be the main focus of new efforts by the European Union to crack down on intellectual property violations as it accounts for two thirds of pirated goods entering the bloc, the EU’s Commission said on Thursday.

“Secondary priorities are identified as Russia, Ukraine, Chile and Turkey,” the Commission said in a statement a day after stressing the importance of intellectual property rights (IPR) in a paper on its future trade strategy. “While the EU does not exclude the possibility of action in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against IPR infringement, the EU is not creating a ‘black list’,” it said.

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Microsoft to step up anti-piracy stance

2006-10-09T07:39:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Corp. is cracking down harder than ever on software piracy as it tries to boost profits, but some say the harsh repercussions facing people who use unlicensed versions of its new Windows Vista operating system could spur a backlash....The crackdown shows how much more seriously Microsoft has started taking Windows piracy, which for years has been extremely widespread in areas such as Russia and China. The Business Software Alliance, a software industry group, estimates that 35 percent of software installed on PCs worldwide is pirated.

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Hurd warning over investment in China

2006-10-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

BRITISH companies may be taking enormous risks by investing in China, according to Lord Hurd of Westwell, the former Foreign Secretary.

He will tell a conference tomorrow that the country possesses few of the enforceable legal and regulatory provisions to which international companies are accustomed.

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Watch out! Big Brother is looking

2006-10-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

PUTRAJAYA: The men were hunched over keyboards staring at LCD computer screens.

They were checking out the offers but were not interested in buying anything. Instead, they were relaying information on the websites through the hands-free communication set.

In another room, enforcement officers were sifting through the files to cross check the information received to make a decision whether to mount a raid.

Malaysians who sell pirated CDs, VCDs and DVDs on the Internet should realise that Big Brother is watching them.

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China steps up anti-piracy campaign

2006-09-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

China will step up its crackdown on pirated publications during the week-long national holidays, which start Oct. 1, said an official with the National Anti-Pornography and Anti-Piracy Office.

The "golden week" holidays are expected to see massive sales of pirated products, according to the official.

Other departments across China have been urged to carry out repeated checks on pirated and illegal publications.

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Piracy to blame for no ITunes Movies For Asia

2006-09-16T20:05:00.000-07:00

Fears of fueling the rampant movie piracy business in places like China and Hong Kong likely prevents Apple from offering movie downloads in most of Asia.

Although an Apple representative would not comment on the piracy issue in a report on Yahoo! News, it is difficult to imagine Steve Jobs and company not considering the prospect of feeding movie releases to mass duplicators just as their DVD counterparts hit the shelves at Wal-Mart.

Licensing agreements also have caused problems for Apple, as recording labels in Japan have shunned iTunes in favor of other outlets. A weak presence in the rapidly expanding Asian Internet market keeps Apple from profiting from that userbase.

"We cannot comment on the specifics but it is true that iTunes is not available in Asia," Tony Li, Apple's marketing director for Asia, said Wednesday. "That goes for music and movies."

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Chinese Google?

2006-09-16T20:03:00.000-07:00

The Rise of Baidu (That’s Chinese for Google)

IN the summer of 1998 at a picnic in Silicon Valley, Eric Xu, a 34-year-old biochemist, introduced his shy, reserved friend Robin Li to John Wu, then the head of Yahoo’s search engine team.

Mr. Li, 30 at the time, was a frustrated staff engineer at Infoseek, an Internet search engine partly owned by Disney, a company whose fading commitment to Infoseek did not mesh with Mr. Li’s ongoing passion for search. Like Disney, Mr. Wu and Yahoo were also losing interest in the business prospects of search, and Yahoo — in a colossal corporate blunder — eventually outsourced all of its search functions to a little startup named Google.

Mr. Xu, who had called together some friends for a documentary he was making on Silicon Valley, thought the two search guys would hit it off. Mr. Wu says he exchanged greetings with Robin Li, but what most impressed him was that despite all of the pessimism surrounding search, Mr. Li remained undaunted.

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Microsoft praises its WGA piracy check

2006-07-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage has faced a whirlwind of criticism, but there should not be any complaints about the accuracy of the actual piracy check, according to Microsoft.

"The total number of what might be actual false positives found over the past year amount to only a fraction of a percent," Alex Kochis, a senior licensing manager at Microsoft, wrote on a corporate Microsoft blog this week.

About one in five of the 300 million PCs that have run WGA validations fail, according to Kochis. That is pretty much in line with industry numbers for software piracy, he wrote.

Windows Genuine Advantage is a stepped-up effort by Microsoft to boost the number of Windows users who actually pay for the operating system. The company has said that roughly a third of Windows copies worldwide have not been acquired legitimately--as a boxed product or bundled onto a machine, for example.

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This blog usually reserves judgment on the stories and lets them speak for themselves, but we feel that MS goes too far on this. We have heard of false "negatives" for people that have a valid copy of windows. Also we have heard of numerous people that while breaking the "letter" of Microsoft’s license have abided by the spirit. I am talking about users who bought a machine loaded with XP only to discover later if they had any problems they had no choice but to wipe and reload from a "restore" partition. Gee, they didn't want to do this, go figure. They found a way around it, but now they are pirates. Or, are they?

Physical Pirate Pleads Guilty

2006-06-20T04:37:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to obtain free software online. At its simplest, legitimate websites such as SourceForge.com or Download.com can generally supply an individual with a variety of free software. For those with larger shopping carts to fill, gray-market avenues such as The Pirate Bay have proven useful. Then there are flat out illegal operations, making no unclear distinctions between civil and criminal law.

This was the case for Danny Ferrer, owner and administrator of BuyUsa.com, who entered a guilty plea on Friday to one count of conspiracy and one count of criminal copyright infringement. The pirate software site, which began operations in September of 2002, set out with the determination to undersell the competition by any means necessary. Mr. Ferrer achieved this lofty goal, and by the end of the year was selling high demand software for a fraction of the manufacturer’s suggested price. Want Adobe PhotoShop but don’t have the $600.00? This conundrum was easily solved by Mr. Ferrer. For a price tag of about $99.99, Adobe’s premier application was shipped to any location world wide.

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SuprNova.org: The Story of a Legend

2006-06-08T05:03:00.000-07:00

Despite the domain being on sale for over a week, there has been no news or discussion on the apparent end to the once all-powerful BitTorrent site, Suprnova.org. Nobody even noticed, and if they did, they decided the news was not worthy or reporting to the world.

It was not always this way, once upon a time SuprNova was as much part of BitTorrent as the client itself, serving up torrents to 420,000 unique visitors a day. Without question, the site revolutionised the dynamics of internet traffic.

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EU Trade Commissioner in China

2006-06-07T06:13:00.000-07:00

The European Union's trade chief Wednesday was expected to press China for increased anti-piracy enforcement and greater market access during meetings with top Chinese officials, amid spats over textiles and shoes.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson spent the day in discussions with Commerce Minister Bo Xilai in Beijing. No details were released. A spokesman at the Commerce Ministry said he had no information on the talks.

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Software piracy still costs billions

2006-06-06T05:36:00.000-07:00

The software-piracy rate worldwide held steady in 2005 from the year before, but losses from the practice increased by more than $1.5 billion, a new study shows.

More than a third of packaged software installed on personal computers worldwide in 2005 was illegal, according to the study, conducted by Business Software Alliance, an international association of software developers with U.S. headquarters in Washington.

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Fight Digital Piracy with Piracy

2006-06-02T15:32:00.000-07:00

Digital piracy costs music, movie, and software industries billions of dollars in profits. With decentralized peer-to-peer online networks offering covert means for people to swap files, digital goods producers are waging a global war against such networks and individual users. But, according to new research at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, efforts to battle internet piracy can sometimes strategically hurt digital goods industries.

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Bosnia's software piracy rate falls

2006-05-26T04:01:00.000-07:00

SARAJEVO : The proportion of software illegally installed on PCs in Bosnia fell to 69 percent last year, industry representatives said on Thursday. But the cost of software piracy increased by $1 million to $13 million, the Bosnian branch of the global Business Software Alliance (BSA) said.

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No movement on piracy

2006-05-23T04:28:00.000-07:00

TECHNOLOGY industry lobbyists have blamed poor management practices and a lack of criminal enforcement for Australia's high rate of software piracy, with a study showing the local piracy numbers have barely budged.

A survey released today by the Business Software Association of Australia and its parent, the US-based Business Software Alliance, shows 31 per cent of Australian business software is pirated, virtually unchanged from 32 per cent in 2005 and 31 per cent in 2004.

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Staunching a tide of piracy

2006-05-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

SO FAR, the entertainment industry's approach to peer-to-peer file sharing has been to hire gumshoes to bang on teenagers' doors at midnight and haul them off to court - an act akin to trying to beat back a tsunami with a tennis racquet. In the process a lot of clever technology has won a bad name, not least Kazaa, owned by Sydney's Sharman Networks.

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U.S. group: China product piracy growing

2006-05-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

BEIJING -- China is still doing too little to fight growing product piracy despite repeated crackdowns, causing mounting damage to legitimate producers of movies, music and other goods, a U.S. business group said Tuesday.

"The problem is growing faster than the enforcement efforts," said Charles Martin, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.

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Man sentenced to 35 months for software piracy

2006-05-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

A 28-year-old Ukrainian man, Maksym Vysochanskyy, was sentenced late Monday in federal court in San Jose to 35 months in prison for his role in selling pirated copies of software from Adobe Systems, Autodesk, Borland Software and Microsoft through Web sites he operated and on eBay, according to Kevin Ryan, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California.

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Boy, 16, arrested for Web piracy at home

2006-05-12T04:40:00.000-07:00

Six months after the world's first criminal conviction of a movie uploader, Hong Kong customs authorities have arrested a 16-year-old Kwun Tong student for using his home computer to make more than 600 songs and 20 movies available for free download on a personal Web site.

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MPAA Employs Piracy-Sniffing Dogs

2006-05-12T04:39:00.000-07:00

There is two new members in the fight against pirate DVDs: two black Labrador Retrievers named Lucky and Flo. The MPAA has backed the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) in training the two dogs to sniff out DVDs in packages coming into the United Kingdom.

The groups claim that pirated DVDs are often smuggled in packages with other contents. In their first test at FedEx's British hub at Stansted Airport in Essex, England, Lucky and Flo successfully sniffed out packages and parcels containing DVDs.

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Singapore Company Found Guilty for Unlicensed Software Usage

2006-05-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

Singapore -- In a landmark criminal case, interior design consultancy PDM International was sentenced to a fine of S$30,000 in court today for the use of unlicensed and illegal software – thereby becoming the first company to be so penalised since Singapore’s Copyright Act was amended on January 1, 2005 to make willful infringement of copyright for commercial gain a criminal offence.
The court case is the result of a successful raid carried out by police officers from the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) branch of the Criminal Investigation Department on September 15 last year where 11 computers were seized.

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BSA happy with self-audit response

2006-05-11T07:43:00.000-07:00

PUTRAJAYA: Antipiracy watchdog the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is pleased its efforts to educate local businesses on the need to use genuine software is making progress, despite some companies staying recalcitrant.

The BSA reported that its software auditing programme last year was well received by Malaysian companies, with 1,493 businesses performing self-audits to check if the software solutions they use are genuine.

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Gates: Beating Asia Piracy to Take 10 Years

2006-05-10T05:28:00.000-07:00

Microsoft founder Bill Gates said on Friday that beating software piracy in China and India and getting compliance up to U.S. and European levels would take 10 years.

"In India and China it will be a decade before we get that level," Gates told business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

"But as long as there is year-by-year progress, it holds a great opportunity for us in terms of scale, which helps us do more, and it's a great place where we have people working for us."

Gates said sales of the company's software in both countries were increasing every year and he was optimistic that China and India would eventually adopt proper licensing practices, just as Taiwan and South Korea had done.

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