Web crawling spies hunt corporate pirates

Software giants who feel cheated of revenue from software piracy have been deploying Web crawling software since January in Europe to curb the loss.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) believes companies are benefiting from illegal software to improve productivity at work.

Theft in the retail market amounts to only 2% compared to a lofty 37% in the software industry say BSA.

The 24 X 7 Web crawling software "is very effective," said Beth Scott, Vice President of EMEA, Business Software Alliance, which works on behalf off and is funded by 15 software vendors including Microsoft and Symantec.

"The sheer scale of the Internet is a daunting challenge and the dynamic base of the Internet makes it impossible to measure the scale of the problem that we have. That is one of the reasons why we had to look at some automated investigative format just like all the other copyright industries."

Asked whether BSA's Web crawler could ever be in breach of data protection, she maintains "BSA's Web crawling technology never probes into anything that isn't made publicly available by an individual using the network."

The Web areas monitored by BSA include "mail order services operated by organized criminals that dupe customers and believe the Internet makes them anonymous," said Scott. "They aren't," she insists, "our investigators identify the criminals involved in these escapades."

When queried about how many investigators BSA employs, she said "we can't be specific because we keep the identity and location of our investigators secret because they receive regular threats" as piracy is big business.
The majority of piracy occurs in business, it isn't just Microsoft office products either but often productivity tools, she said. "If someone is stealing a business productivity tool, their company becomes more productive."
"People are aware of it but aren't putting procedures in place to do anything about it," she said.
The BSA write to at least one million companies across Europe every year to try and police piracy in business.
"Our sense is that underlicensing is still the biggest challenge," she said.

"We've found companies rife with illegal software where the managing director is stunned because his employees had software and he couldn't understand why they needed it. Employees had downloaded it from the Web because they wanted it," she said.

The latest crackdown by the BSA and Italian Guardia de Finanza in June brought down one of the biggest software piracy groups in Europe, thought to be worth 1 million Euros.

Sarah Hilley