Archive for July, 2007

My apologies for the drought of posts. Things are hot. Not just the Zaca Fire, which has been burning since Independence Day and just had the estimated date of containment extended until SEPTEMBER 7^th. That’s right, a natural disaster that will run over two months, and still might not kill anyone. For those of us that live within range, that is intermittent ash falling, health advisories, and futile car washing. Still as disasters go, this is a blessing. At least that fire is burning wilderness, and as long as the winds are favorable, no human constructs will be threatened as it reduces the fuel load of the semi arid region.

This is in direct contrast to the bonfire one can make of the clippings about the worldwide piracy situation. The best detail to note is that the term “piracy enforcement” returns over 300 items on Google News search. Especially encouraging is the activity in China, where raids and arrests in Guandong province targets what is estimated to be the world’s largest enterprise pirate. Note however that the dateline on the story is out of Redmond Washington, meaning that the hub of media on this case is from the home of the worlds largest software publisher. While the FBI and China’s Public Security Bureau cooperated on the bust, it seems that Microsoft is driving the media. And it is because they had better.

Take this article for instance in BusinessWeek Online/MSNBC. In it, Henry Chesbrough asks “is the giant shortsighted” for enforcing its copyright instead of letting pirates help it build marketshare? This begs a number of questions, such as whether or not one truly has a share of a market when the money is going to usurpers. There is also evidence that tainted food supply questions may have as much to do with this new sprit of cleaning up the outlaw manufacturing of items like software and drugs like Viagra in China as anything else.

Compared to the motion picture industry, there isn’t much argument that stealing a copy of an application is theft, yet there are voices suggesting that it is bad business in the long run to enforce the license and protect that property. What support will Hollywood have?

Even in the industry’s home base, movie piracy has been the purview of the vice squad. How piracy ever gets to the top of that priority list is something we’d like to see.

The LA Times reported a couple of weeks ago that AT&T ( a name that has lost all relationship to the company and standards I associated with it just a few decades back) is looking to “help” the studios out. Exploratory talks are all that has happened, but the gist of those is to create some way to ‘sniff out’ piracy in AT&T trunks of the internet. Watchdog groups have trotted out the big brother/privacy concerns, and this is before any actual tools or technology have been specified.

While it is interesting that another corporate giant is eager to help the content kings, this isn’t new. The whole DRM structure exists because the IT industry, working with the Consumer Electronics companies, were sure that this piracy beast could be brought down by a silver bullet. It should be expected that as long as the AT&T folks are carrying the water, this effort will be encouraged and explored.

Unfortunately, the blowback continues, and is articulated here by a New Zealand poster, “The problem is, the war on piracy, like the war on drugs, isn’t working. It’s making everyday people feel like criminals for doing things that are, let’s face it, commonplace.”

The problem is more pronounced in New Zealand, where proposed law makes it illegal to
copy your CD to a hard drive.

Enforcement, is of course a challenge regardless of the details of what constitutes a crime in this area. While the piracy rate is estimated to be 80% in Africa, the resources to do anything about it are as rare as a stable government and adequate policing. According to a Swiss senior economic counselor at the Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, speaking at a conference in Geneva about rights enforcement “It’s nice to have good-looking laws and regulations, but if they are not enforced they are not worth anything,” The Swiss are impacted by the trade in fake watches, and is also the second largest source of counterfeit goods entering the EU.

While the existing laws are under enforced, if at all, and there are some circumstances where the enforcement is considered overenthusiastic by some, here in the US of A, we just add more to the list of what constitutes a crime. A recent bill was introduced to make ‘attempting’ to pirate a crime.

Here at USVO, we are chomping at the bit to turn loose our solution. SmartMarks are poised to enter wider use. When they do, expect an enforcement story and a conviction to turn a few heads. Letting honest people be honest, and buy lots of product is the right way to approach this problem. Catching crooks and taking them out of the market is going to require enforcement, but it will be much simpler with SmartMarks.