Defending their copyright with your taxes
Published: 12 May 2005 12:45 BST
The BSA claims that while DrinkorDie may have been shut down as a result of co-ordinated global law enforcement actions, other warez groups are still active and continuing to cause harm. Jago was unable to provide figures on how much money software vendors had lost as a result of DrinkorDie's illegal pursuits but cited a study undertaken by IDC and commissioned by the BSA to indicate the knock-on effects of piracy on the wider economy.
The report found that 29 percent of software in the UK is not licensed properly, and that if 10 percent of this software was properly licensed paid for, the industry could generate a further £10 billion towards the UK's gross domestic product, provide £2.5 billion more in tax revenues and create 40,000 extra jobs, all within a three year period.
But some security experts claim it is high time that software vendors started becoming more proactive in protecting their software by using readily available technological mechanisms to safeguard it.
Hare Brown said: "It's not rocket science. It's about software companies making up their minds. They either want evidence to show that this software should be on that PC or they want a wide as possible distribution of their software and so are prepared to turn a blind eye. So the question is why haven't they put more stringent mechanisms in place to license their software before?"
Even five years ago, before online license registration was possible, suppliers could have requested that customers register their applications over the telephone, for example.
The fear was, however, that they would simply go to rivals rather than bother "so the software companies made it simple to use and asked customers to just click and agree. But now they don't want people stealing their software so they're gradually tightening down and it's also easier to do now there's the Internet", explains Hare Brown
There are already mechanisms in existence that could be used to stop software piracy from the outset such as digital watermarking or authentication, he argues.
"There's been a lot of research work funded by the European Union to come up with better mechanisms to prevent software piracy. It's put a lot of money into it, but it always takes time before the software community gets together and decides to adopt any particular form of copyright prevention technology," says Hare Brown.
The BSA's response to such logic is that, while its members have been exploring such options for some time, there is no one-size-fits-all-approach and different software markets require different IP protection solutions. "In terms of technical solutions, it's something that the industry has been looking at since piracy began. But it's a question of balancing intellectual-property protection against not holding back the legitimate needs of users," says the BSA's Jago.
Self-proclaimed anti-piracy groups such as the BSA argue there is "no silver bullet" for solving these problems as at the end of the day it comes down to individual ethics.
"The DrinkorDie group were hobbyists who were more or less competing among themselves as to who could crack code the quickest, but the problem is one of IP protection. In some cases, it's taken years and a huge investment to develop this software and if it's cracked and made available to anyone who wants to download it, it can be used for counterfeit purposes to sell on," says Jago.
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