Cadalyst - February 2008 - (Page 14)

techtrends Dividing the Digital Plunder The clash of IP laws, pirated software, and protection technologies force us to reexamine our attitudes. By Kenneth Wong M icrosoft, Adobe, and Autodesk — every vendor in the high-tech sector feels the weight of this burgeoning industry. Operating within a loose network with little or no structure, this relatively young market thrives on a supply chain that stretches across China, India, Russia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Its distribution channels include legitimate outfits such as eBay, dubious corners of the open-air bazaars in Bangkok and Mumbai, and anything in between. According to the most recent study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the International Data Group (IDG), pirated software accounts for 35% of what’s installed on personal computers. The estimated value of the software pirated in 2006 is $40 billion. That’s the equivalent of three times the money spent on product lifecycle management (PLM) during the same period, reported as $13.2 billion by CIMdata. In the ambiguous intersection where intellectual property (IP) laws, consumer rights, and anti-piracy technology collide, we must wrestle with our ethics and principles. And depending on our personal stance toward IP, we may be part of the problem — or the solution. The legitimate software market in the developed world is much greater than the pirated software market in the same region. The ratio is the reverse in emerging countries. However, because the software market in the developed world is eight times that of the emerging countries, the losses from piracy in the developed world still ranks higher than those from the emerging countries. (Graph created based on data from the Fourth Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study) What he eventually figured out was that the buyer had been using “$11 million worth of licenses.” What stewed him more than anything was that the perpetrator was not a cash-strapped small business. It was “a $30 billion company,” he said. Hackers Call for Tech Support Roughly five years ago, when Michael Dager was the CEO of a software company, the company sold approximately $900,000 worth of software to a customer. “Very soon, we started getting support calls for the software from all around the world, from 15 different locations in Korea alone,” he recalled. “Our maintenance people couldn’t find their licenses on our records. The only location where this software should be in deployment was at a specific project in Seoul.” From Russia with Love Payback came when Dager took the helm of Arxan, an antipiracy vendor, which describes its products as “software hardening solutions.” Simply put, they make the pirates’ job harder. One of Arxan’s customers is an oil-field modeling software vendor. With their sales to a Russian oil company, they became the pirates’ targets. “With every new release they shipped, within 48 hours, they began to see hundreds of illegal copies appear at the client’s site,” Dager said. License control tools didn’t help; the hackers always managed to find ways to circumvent them. Eventually, the vendor signed on with Arxan and closed up the loopholes. “In March of this year, they shipped their latest release,” said Dager. “They anxiously waited to see if illegal copies would crop up. They waited 48 hours, then a week, then a month . . . two months later, still no piracy.” Meanwhile, the Arxan sales team was getting random calls from Russia requesting copies of the anti-piracy software. Dager believes those calls came from people attempting to reverse-engineer his client’s software. To do that, they must first deconstruct Arxan’s protection layers. Hence, the frantic calls. In this article Arxan www.arxan.com Fourth Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study w3.bsa.org/globalstudy Mastercam www.mastercam.com William Patry’s copyright blog http://williampatry.blogspot.com SolidWorks www.solidworks.com 14 February 2008 | cadalyst | www.cadalyst.com http://www.arxan.com http://w3.bsa.org/globalstudy http://www.mastercam.com http://williampatry.blogspot.com http://www.solidworks.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - February 2008

Cadalyst - February 2008 Contents Editor's Window CAD Central Tech Trends More than Meets the Eye — A Look at Today's CAD Viewers IronCAD v10 — 3D Modeling Software AcceliArch with AcceliCAD — Add-In Architectural Drawing and Modeling Software CAD Manager MCAD Modeling AEC Insight CAD Cartoon Issue Indexes Hot Tip Harry

Cadalyst - February 2008

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