Defending their copyright with your taxes
Published: 12 May 2005 12:45 BST
While Sommer acknowledges that the crimes committed were not victimless, he argues that the corporate victims weren't exactly defenceless but rather large companies that are, in the main, not even based in the UK.
"While they do have a problem, there are various remedies in terms of the civil courts and how they sell and distribute software. When there's scarce funding available, in my view, protecting companies is lower down the scale than protecting children abused by online paedophile rings," says Sommer.
Other experts have also questioned whether the ponderous judicial system can really keep pace with the changing activities and trends amongst the hacking fraternity. "Trends are shifting and because crackers do this for academic pleasure, they're going to want to move onto what's trendy. Warez groups are starting to die out, and although there's still quite a lot of activity on the Web, it's mainly between hackers and so is a limited market," says Neil Hare Brown, senior security advisor at security incident response company, QCC Information Security.
Crackers have started looking for challenges elsewhere, argues Hare-Brown. While some have simply refocused their energies on working within the open source community in a more benevolent fashion, others have started concentrating on the games market, which so far has received less attention from law enforcement agencies than the commercial applications world.
"There's already an illegal burgeoning in the games market, with a good number of recent cracks on disk protection. The market is now saturated and it's easy to distribute illegal software in markets like that. People are just ripping stuff off DVDs and putting it on peer-to-peer networks," says Hare Brown.
But another problem indicates Sommer, who works as a research fellow at the London School of Economics, is that the lack of structure of warez groups means that members simply reappear elsewhere under different guises if they come under scrutiny.
"I suspect that many of the people that were in DrinkorDie are now doing other things. The US produced affinity charts trying to marry individuals to groups and it got very complex because a lot of them had different roles in different groups," he explains.
This lack of central structure means that it is very difficult to pursue a decapitation strategy or to round up ring leaders and "makes it a different type of case to investigate than drugs cartels", where there is an obvious hierarchy.
As a result, from a software publisher's point of view, Sommer believes, "going down the legal route is not the most effective means of protecting intellectual property. Mechanisms such as online registration may be rarer, but they're more effective because you can connect a software release to a real computer".
But Shona Jago, communications director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at anti-piracy group the Business Software Alliance (BSA), claims it was necessary to make an example of the DrinkorDie members to try and prevent such cases happening again.
"This group did a lot of damage while it was operating and other groups are still doing damage. I think there's a deterrent value in showing that the law can act against this type of criminal activity. It's important that people understand that this type of activity is against the law and they can get caught," she says.
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