The warez scene has once again suffered some significant losses due to the recent multi-country crackdowns.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8419601/
Alleged Net pirates raided across globe
11-nation operation targets large-scale online distributorsUpdated: 1:00 p.m. ET June 30, 2005
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department announced Thursday an 11-nation crackdown on large-scale Internet pirates who illegally distribute first-run movies, video games and other copyrighted materials.FBI agents and investigators in the other nations conducted 90 searches starting Wednesday, arresting four people and shutting down at least eight major online distribution servers for pirated works, a Justice official said. Authorities also seized hundreds of computers in raids in the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales planned a news conference Thursday afternoon to announce the arrests and other measures that law enforcement officials are taking as part of Operation Site Down.
Among those arrested was Chirayu Patel of Fremont, Calif., on charges of violating federal copyright protection laws, said a law enforcement official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to preempt the official announcement.
Patel is alleged to be a member of a “warez” group, a kind of underground Internet co-op that is set up to trade in copyrighted materials. Warez (pronounced “wares”) groups are extraordinarily difficult to infiltrate because users talk only in encrypted chat rooms, their computer servers require passwords and many are located overseas, the FBI has said.
Warez groups differ from popular file-swapping networks, where millions of files are shared without such precautions.Last month, authorities shut down a popular Web site that facilitated the downloading of movies and other materials. Investigators said many of the copyright movies were available through the Elite Torrents site even before their commercial release. No arrests were announced at the time.
President Bush signed a new law last month setting tough penalties of up to 10 years in prison for anyone caught distributing a movie or song prior to its commercial release.
Keep in mind that the scene derives absolutely no personal benefit / profit from it’s action, AND the scene is what keeps many of these companies afloat in the first place. Let me elaborate on the latter point. Many of you probably have no idea how much some of the commonly used softwares cost, so let me give you a few examples:
- Adobe Photoshop CS: 599.00
- Adobe Acrobat 7: 449.00
- Microsoft Office 2003 Standard: 399.00
Most people probably take these softwares for granted because they know someone who just happened to have given them a copy for free. Realistically, how many of you would have bought these softwares at the prices listed above? I would wager that the answer would be close to nil. Many of you would probably seek cheaper alternatives to accomplish the same task, for example:
- Gimp: Free
- OpenOffice: Free
The feature set for these cheaper softwares are currently weaker, but how many of you truly know how to use all the functions on photoshop? Did you really need Photoshop to add borders to your digital pictures? However, due to the warez scene, most people do use photoshop (hey, it’s free, why not?) for image editing (regardless of how trivial the editing is), thus giving photoshop huge amounts of market share (intangible asset+++) that otherwise might have belonged to smaller software houses. This has the end result of eliminating virtually all their competition but also making them far less competitive for pricing (why make it cheap, corporations have no alternatives, end-users aren’t paying!).
Numbers in the billions are commonly thrown around by the software industries when they discuss how software piracy has affected their bottomlines. As I addressed earlier, many copies of their software would not have been used anyway if not for warez. Furthermore, those who use warez commonly contribute value to the software that they’ve warezed. Let’s use Adobe Photoshop as an example again. Many of the tutorials and plugins that you see floating around the internet are created by users who have warezed the software! Furthermore, because so many users begin using their software at a young age, many of them end up using them in their professional work (with legal licenses).
This sort of intangible assets and continuing market shares is something that these companies secretly enjoy and relish while they publicly blast warez. If warez were to entirely disappear today, microsoft and adobe would be in serious trouble…
