FAST tracks down 25 companies illegally sharing software

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) is working to identify companies that are illegally sharing software on the Internet through P2P services. The organisations' "Operation Tracker" has just produced its results for its second phase which was launched in April. It has identified 25 companies where software is being illegally shared on the Internet.

FAST is tackling companies as it is aware that many employees make use of available high speed connections to share copyright material. SMEs (stands for small to medium-sized enterprises) are the worst offenders for such activity. FAST refers to its system as the CCTV of the Internet. Operation Tracker searches for software sharers and builds a library of what they have make available.

FAST said that this is a warning to directors who prevail over an environment where employees break the law. After the first phase of Operation Tracker, FAST recovered several thousand pounds and 18 identified individuals signing binding undertakings.

"Tracker works, and if corporates and their management teams think they can either hide from or ignore their liabilities they are going to have to think again. Misuse of software is something directors cannot plead ignorance to. If their staff are using the corporate network for illegal activity, those in charge may be liable. Theft is theft and will be treated accordingly." commented John Lovelock, director general of FAST.

Source:
Computer Weekly

Written by: James Delahunty @ 17 Jun 2006 15:59

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35 comments

ZippyDSM

Fast is currently chaseing its tail...endlessly....

17.6.2006 17:01 #1

gogochar

Point of the story is: Buy your software legally and this won't happen. It's getting harder and harder to not get caught with illegal software, so just leave it alone, for Christ's sakes!

17.6.2006 17:03 #2

ZippyDSM

gogochar
and while your at it dont make personal copies and buy 2 of everyhting! *L*

17.6.2006 17:51 #3

Cinnjerm

"It's getting harder and harder to not get caught with illegal softwa"-

Since when?

17.6.2006 18:47 #4

Mik3h

Companies? No way have companies decided to share pirated software.

-Mike

18.6.2006 01:35 #5

munx

Come on, can you honestly tell me someone from MPAA, RIAA, governemnt employees, senators, worldwide leaders have never used/installed/downloaded something "illegally." If you were to check some of the HD's you'd probably see stuff that shouldn't be there. How long will they bite the hand that feed them?

18.6.2006 07:23 #6

plutonash

gogochar are you an employee of FAST. I nearly spit out the cereal in my mouth when I read your post LOL.

18.6.2006 09:39 #7

ofolion

So they trying to stop employees using the net connection at work improperly...How do they expect all employers to do monitor all there workers for this?!

Are employers even at fault if they dont know of it? I thought they were only at fault if they knew and did nothing about it?

18.6.2006 12:09 #8

hot_ice

If your a CEO of a corporation, I doubt you need to use illegal software.

18.6.2006 12:31 #9

oappi

"Theft is theft and will be treated accordingly."
... and you have to pay same ammount of fine for stealing software from the internet and store?

Although i believe piracy in general is wrong its even more wrong to steal something and make money with it. Most of what is downloaded to private use are usualy something that they wouldn�t buy anyway which make any estimate of loose kinda hilarious.

18.6.2006 13:14 #10

ZippyDSM

ofolion
its fcked up to the point that local radio news(and local talk radio) dont bother with useing a comp much becuse most are blocked to death and they can only report on every other thing...its rather dim......and rather simple its called a contract when you work for soemone you are alowed to do so much online and if you get cought you will be faced with fines and shit if company is and such.....god arent these bissness people?!?! 0_o

Lt me add most local radio staions have been consumed by clear channle a large corperate radio clearing house thus all comps will be blocked via corperate mandate.....I wonder if they block news and info on clear channle to *LOL*

18.6.2006 13:23 #11

tuxbox

maybe if software wast so damn expensive there would probaly be less piracy. for example like dreamweaver an microsoft office are expensive as hell

18.6.2006 16:37 #12

hot_ice

What charging 400$ for software is expensive. Come on! LOL

This is what happens when you have no competition, and a monopoly on prices.

Is there competition for Windows? Not really, unless you are using linux, or have cooked up your own homebrewed OS.

18.6.2006 16:44 #13

shraven

You guys must be highschool kids - never been in the workplace - with poor reading comprehension skills to boot.

The article said they are tracking companies where a lot of traffic in illegal copies is hosted on P2P. In other words, they're finding p2p abusers who are doing this from work, utilizing the fast connections business have.
Example: I sit at my desk, and p2p all day.
The company could be entirely unaware and not doing anything illegal themselves, but employees are generating illegal traffic which can be traced back to IP addresses owned by the company.
Any good network admin can use tools to identify how much and what traffic is going from each user. And there should be web filtering in place as well to prevent users from using p2p in the first place.

19.6.2006 11:31 #14

ZippyDSM

shraven
sicne when do the posts of these threads follow the topic to the letter? :P

19.6.2006 14:45 #15

tomfin

Sigh...

"'Theft is theft and will be treated accordingly."
commented John Lovelock, director general of FAST.'

Please, would anyone who belives copyright infringement is the same as theft, read the following page:
http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/ffi/ffi1.htm

It's just a bit of friendly help for those of us who ought to fully comprehend what a theft is, but still seem determined to equate it to piracy or copyright infringement.

They are not the same! Theft is not piracy, nor is piracy theft.

You'd think someone in that organisation might have opened a dictionary in the last ten years, but no.

(C)heers!

19.6.2006 19:16 #16

hot_ice

Theft is depriving someone of their tangible assets. Like stealing a chair for example, is considered to be a theft.

Intangible things like data, that's a debatable issue.

19.6.2006 19:51 #17

tuxbox

"They are not the same! Theft is not piracy, nor is piracy theft."

if its not theft then what is it?? is it stealing?? or what

19.6.2006 19:53 #18

ZippyDSM

tuxbox
piracy is not "theft" becuse in most cases the people buying or gettign stuff from piracy are unable to pay the sometimes insane amount of money they want for thier data.
When a company is makeing milloins hand over fist its even more of a moot point.

However I can see smaller Bissness being hurt by it..but realy are thier such thigns anymore? if it will make a profit the coperations are on it like blood in the water.....

I have a brain...I think......

Windows Vister
I dub thee vister untill thee can prove thyself.

I aint the brightest bulb around but I can feel my way in the dark...

I fuzzy braind mew =0_o=

FIGHT THE M.A.F.I.A.A.
"Music And Film Industry Association of America.."

19.6.2006 20:00 #19

tuxbox

ZIppyDSM

i look up theft an piracy

Main Entry: theft
Function: noun
Etymology: Old English thiefth
: LARCENY; broadly : a criminal taking of the property or services of another without consent
NOTE: Theft commonly encompasses by statute a variety of forms of stealing formerly treated as distinct crimes.

Main Entry: pi�ra�cy
Pronunciation: 'pI-r&-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -cies
1 : an act of robbery esp. on the high seas; specifically : an illegal act of violence, detention, or plunder committed for private ends by crew or passengers of a private ship or aircraft against another ship or aircraft on the high seas or in a place outside the jurisdiction of any state �see also AIRCRAFT PIRACY Article I of the CONSTITUTION in the back matter
2 a : the unauthorized copying, distribution, or use of another's production (as a film) esp. in infringement of a copyright <software piracy> b : the unauthorized use, interception, or receipt of encoded communications (as satellite cable programming) esp. to avoid paying fees for use <the statute's purpose is to proscribe the piracy of programming signals �United States v. Harrell, 983 Federal Reporter, Second Series 36 (1993)>
3 : the crime of committing piracy

now i get what you were talking about

19.6.2006 20:05 #20

ZippyDSM

tuxbox

bribery =lobbyism
Soemtiems they can afford to make up words to make them sound better than what they are.

Look at the insurance industry they constanly rise rates even if you have less stuff on your properity to protect....I'll give you piracy is bad but coperations are still masters of the seas the land and the air and will rarely bend to the needs of the people,the people need simple heaper prieing shcemes its not going to happen when the coperations rule completly.
Handicaping Movies,MP3s and even OS's (vista) will only annoy the poeple more and more where will it end I dont know but untill greed vanishs piracy is here to stay.

19.6.2006 20:24 #21

borhan9

The thing for me is yes it does happen no doubt. But These big companies are mega rich. I know with educational institutions. by multi lisences so they can distribute software on multipple computer systems. The question I have is. Why don't companies do the same?

20.6.2006 21:37 #22

ZippyDSM

borhan9
becuse they would make less money :P

20.6.2006 21:43 #23

borhan9

@ZIppyDSM

I understand that, but it still no excuse. They have money comming out of every hole and they still wanna be cheap skates :)

20.6.2006 22:00 #24

hot_ice

I think when the ten commandments were written, God wasn't refering to computer data, he was refering to tangible items.

So that's why I think piracy is debatable. Besides, when these corporations are billionaires, are they really losing money, the answer is a resounding no. There is so much profit, I can't even big to fathom what I would do with a billion dollars.

Maybe buy the umbro shorts that I saw at sports experts...yess....

21.6.2006 18:12 #25

ZippyDSM

hot_ice
*nods nods*

21.6.2006 21:31 #26

dufas

The way the MPAA, RIAA, and the software boys look at it, one who shares is stealing a possible sale of the data, music, or video. If the law looked at it in the same vain as stealing a chair, there would be 250,000 arrests of the recipient of any of these copyrighted goods. Also, if copyright infringement were the same as stealing, one who stole a DVD or a music CD from a stor would be liable for $250,000.00 in fines and up to 5 years in prison.

As far as how much the entertainment industry is loosing, I think it is highly inflated to what the entertainment industry wished they could make.

Example... In year xxxx, the industry says they lost one point 4 billion due to file trading, a total of 13 percent. In that same year, the industry states that they made 5 and one half billion. According to the figures of what they made and what they lost, they expected to make around 6 point 9 billion in that year which totals almost double of what they actually earned. So, the 13 percent loss is nothing more than PR to exite the authorities and other public figures. The industry has no way of figuring any loss or if they actually lost any thing. They are making estiments of loss based on an approximation of the number of traded files times a fixed price each. They still do not know if a shared file would have been purchased. In reality, most of them would not have. An extreme example would be a particular animation program that costs a little over $50,000.00 a copy. This same company says that it has lost millions because of file sharing. How many file sharers would even look at a $50,000.00 program to purchase yet these sharers are figured in as a net loss to the company. Again, their figures are bogus....

23.6.2006 14:27 #27

ZippyDSM

Take star track for exsample if you take a commen ammount of energy and creat a chair from nothing you can share to a almost unlimited ammount.

ltho with greed,money and made up numbers it all goes toh ell quickly,they should focuse on the people SELLING the copies,puting virus in the copies or putting adware and other crap in the copies, but like all else thier foucs is off......and it gets better with the new preium net coperations are trying to sneak by us oy vay.....

23.6.2006 14:35 #28

ChiefBrdy

I say let Exxon/Mobile pay off the MPAA. 8 billion dollars profit a quarter while we pay $3 a gallon. Now THAT's piracy.

24.6.2006 01:55 #29

hot_ice

3$ a gallon in the U.S. is pretty cheap. We pay here in Quebec approximately, 1.10$ a liter. 1 gallon is 3.7852 liters, therefore, 4.16$ a gallon.

Besides, we need a new energy source, and in the next 40 years or less, there will be a huge energy crisis if we don't find something to replace it.

In any event, the MPAA should be held accountable for their actions.

24.6.2006 11:47 #30

ZippyDSM

ChiefBrdy
I can see them needing 1 or 2 billoin to go after the worlds oil whever it is and maye use soe of that to go into a backup plan when oli fails........that said....... 6billoin of it they dont need,the goverment can no longer rain in the coperations and thus the goverment fails and is now owen by them.....

hot_ice
heres a thought focus on ethnol while working on makeing batteries worth while for vehicles,rain in theoil companys and make it simple either give us your exxsee profits so we can help the ilo industry work on new power soruces or you wont be makeing a profit ever again in the US.

while we are at it tax the lvieing hell out of imports from china,make it not so easy to for coperations to send moeny and jobs away,protect the boarders...hell at elast protect the contry 0-o
forget the econemy its the contry stupid!

24.6.2006 13:08 #31

duckNrun

hot_ice is that $4.16 a gallon USD?

Also I am pretty positive that a good portion of whatever the costs in Canada are the same as Europe... TAXES not fuel costs.

Here in the states depending on where one is at (state taxes on gas vary, federal taxes same everywhere) amount to well under a DOLLAR PER GALLON and are probably under 50 cents/gallon combined.

So even with the taxes taken out of the equation the oil companies are making the MAJORITY of the $3 a gallon in the US and elsewhere!

Gas resellers (conveniance stores) typically only make a few pennies per gallon for regular unleaded. For the higher end octanes they make a few pennies PLUS the price difference between the gas types.

The other reason for high fuel is the Government mandated use of ethanol (which is itself taxed and regulated) which also raises the cost of gas.

And I fully agree with others... we need an alternative fuel source not only for the earth but also to stop money flowing into the Middle East and reduce that area's importance upon the world stage!

26.6.2006 16:20 #32

hot_ice

@ducknrun, 4.16 canadian, amounts to 3.71 USD, but that's with taxes in.

And as for the Middle East comment, I can sense tension on that one :O

Touchy issue...

26.6.2006 17:31 #33

xanthony

AARRRRRR!!!!! Me matey... batton down the hatches, tis a storm that be blowin' in!
And we all know what kind of storm it be.

27.6.2006 06:52 #34

hot_ice

Argh, 'tis in my opinion that ye oil companies and Fast should walk the plank!

27.6.2006 12:35 #35

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