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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