Microsoft And Their Never Ending Battle Against Piracy [Piracy]

The NY Times has a lengthy report on the constant threat of software piracy and Microsoft’s evolving fight against it. It’s a sordid tale involving organized crime, billions of greenbacks, CSI-like techniques and foreign governments.

Microsoft is actually training intellectual-property protection squads in foreign countries to aid fight their battle. Together they’re looking to take down the large business of software counterfeiting. But these guys are good! There are factories literally churning out thousands of pirated discs and mimicking Microsoft’s authentic product as best they’ll. For instance, consistent with the NY Times:

As one technique of looking to tell the true article from a faux, Microsoft embeds about an inch of a distinct kind of thread in each ” certificate of authenticity” sticker found on boxes of software and computers. The investigators spotted dozens of spools of counterfeit thread – 81 miles worth – at the Chinese warehouse.

And Microsoft is fighting a war on all fronts. If the pirates aren’t delivering their counterfeited product in classic boxes and CDs, they’re putting out downloadable links all around the web to grab pirated Microsoft software. Consistent with Microsoft, there was a time once they removed 10,000 links of pirated software a month. Now, it’s 800,000 a month.

A rather new wrinkle is that organized crime is expanding their business into counterfeit software. Interestingly, they view it as a low-risk, high-profit complement to drugs and kidnapping. In keeping with the Times:

The group even stamps the disks it produces with ” FMM,” which stands for Familia Morelia Michoacana, right alongside the original brand of varied software makers.

Piracy is everywhere. And it seems like Microsoft will stick with it developing new how you can fight it forever. Investigate the NY Times for their full report. [ NY Times ]

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This post is tagged: authentic product, certificate of authenticity, counterfeit software, foreign countries, intellectual property protection, microsoft software, organized crime