RSSCounterfeiters sing the 'Blue' as Microsoft lawyers up
By Angela Gunn | Published December 4, 2008, 5:37 PM
A 12-nation crackdown on software counterfeiters is keeping Microsoft's lawyers busy this week, with 63 legal actions under way against shady online sellers.
The majority of cases announced on Thursday involve fake versions of XP and XP-related software; no surprise, as popular products at the end of their life cycle are often vulnerable to counterfeiters' wiles, as would-be buyers freak out and stock up. What's surprising is the amount of effort the auctioneers put into their marketing schemes -- a trend toward "more brazen" pirate activity, according to Matt Lundy, a senior attorney with Microsoft's World-Wide Anti-Piracy Team.
One effort, involving the "Blue Edition" of Office, illustrates the problem nicely. You're not slacking on your Office trivia; there is no "Blue Edition." The auctioneers, however, claimed that would-be buyers hadn't heard of it because it was a special, limited release. Buyers who took the bait on Blue Edition auctions -- many of which were conducted on respectable sites such as eBay, Amazon and (ouch) MSN Shopping -- received, essentially, writable CDs or DVDs with a blue design printed on and a copy of Office burned in. In some cases, the "Blue Edition" code appeared to have been altered, though Lundy declined to say whether those changes included malware or the like.
Burned buyers turned to Microsoft for help, and that's where the fun began. Over the past several months, the proprietors of hundreds of sketchy auctions were contacted, and Microsoft worked with auction sites to remove questionable listings. ("We partner with eBay to remove, daily, listings for counterfeit software," says Lundy.) All of the sellers who could be located were served with cease-and-desist letters, and those who chose not to comply are being sued.
Action is underway against counterfeiters in the US (16 legal proceedings this week), Germany (12), France (12), and the UK (7), plus cases in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Mexico and New Zealand. Lundy points out that each country has its own way of handling copyright and trademark issues, so Thursday's efforts were even more complex that you'd expect.
In the US, civil cases were filed in district court in western Washington against defendants from 12 states. Other countries make violations a matter for law enforcement; there were police raids on suspected vendors in Brazil and Canada. An investigation in Japan found one seller funneling shoppers from a legitimate e-commerce site to his own, where he sold the fakeware. And some cases make you wonder what else the accused parties were up to -- in Colombia, cases in Bogota and Medellin netted suspects who are also believed to be engaged in tax evasion and fraud, neither of which charge is anything to sniff at.
A savvy observer might wonder why China's not on the list, especially since at least some of the actual warez came from there. China has, notes Lundy, been on the receiving end of Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts before; this week's group just doesn't happen to involve any China-based sellers. Likewise, busts like these happen year-round -- though Microsoft acknowledges that the timing, near the top of the holiday shopping season, has a certain consumer-education aspect.
Is anyone else amused by the fact that they are busting people for selling pirated copies of XP, but apparently not of Vista?
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|There is a definitely a need to educate people more about free alternative. Schools should favor open source OS and software over proprietary solutions. Among the customers who got scammed, did they really want these software? Maybe some of them didn't know that there are free alternatives.
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|Microsoft Office Blue Edition = msobe.
It's been circulating since Office 2007 came out. It is a stand-alone, unattended administrative install of Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise.
It's on the USENET, IRC, torrents...has been for ages.
As for malware, I can't speak for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of copies floating around, but the original "scene" release contained none.
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|You mean the thing that DIGITAL dropped on the torrents etc a while back? I'm gonna go with Microsoft's lawyer on this one. To quote Matt Lundy directly: "'Blue Edition' is a fictitious marketing scheme that some software pirates are using to trick consumers into buy low-quality versions of Microsoft products."
Now, I never saw the original crack, so maybe that iteration carried no code tweaks of note -- I haven't any reason to think the DIGITAL crew would have done any nasty malware stuff. But whether or not later iterations have bad stuff in them, the fact remains that the original warez are just that -- warez. Beware!
[Comment ETA the exact quote, acquired over email Friday afternoon.]
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|I'm not saying that the "scene" didn't get the idea from, or even grab a copy and repackage it from the "commercial software pirates".
I was just pointing out the admittedly few facts I knew about the "Blue Edition".
Matt is spot on, of course. I wasn't refuting that. Just stating that it has progressed to something more than a counterfeit CD available through 3rd world "black markets" as there was no reference in the article to it being readily available online as well (Perhaps "readily" is now outdated... It was many months ago but has since dropped from most sites\trackers\groups as newer repacks have become popular).
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|Piracy is sharing a copy of a program with a friend. Thats one thing. This is downright stealing and trickery for the end user and a huge profit loss to Microsoft for whom people want to buy legitimate versions of a product.
Microsoft has my support and vote on this one.
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|Good for Microsoft. I'd rather people use GNU/Linux than steal Windows. But if you do use it, render unto Microsoft the booty Microsoft asks. And yes, let's hope this is a real crackdown rather than another EULA-rattling display.
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|Most software in China is counterfeit (as are most of their products), it would be nearly impossible to really crack down there.
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|Of course this means nothing in the end. It is just to make it look like they're accomplishing something when in reality they are failing. Sort of like the so-called war on drugs as well..
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|War on drugs, war on terror, war on piracy...
How about a war on wars with broad general terms instead of a clearly defined target?
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|(ponders) I had an editor once who, having been through an actual war with atrocities and carnage and whatnot, got *extremely* irate when people threw the word "war" around when they meant "conflict" or "struggle" or "crackdown" or the like. I'm with you, Scary Guy, re avoiding these vague terms, but I also wish we'd be more cautious invoking the three-letter word as well.
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