Physical Pirate Pleads Guilty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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