Inside a nondescript office building here, investigators for the Business Software Alliance, and industry trade group, are working to track down software pirates around the world.
To help maintain secrecy, they often rely on several computers running on different operating systems, with special programs allowing them to switch Internet service providers every 60 seconds.
"I can be perceived to be in China in one minute and in the US the next minute, so they wouldn't be able to track it back to me," said one investigator, who allowed a reporter to follow his activity on the condition he not be identified.
Long before downloading music and movies became a hobby of teenagers and others, the software industry was struggling to keep digital pirates at bay. Even in the pre-Internet 1980s, introducing software was fraught with peril.
"If it didn't have copy protection, you lost that market, and you would never get it back," said Deanna Slocum, an antipiracy manager at Macromedia, which makes software to develop multimedia presentations.
Since then, the industry has developed techniques to safeguard programs and thwart pirates, and global software piracy rates have declined somewhat. Yet the advent of peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing programs like KaZaa is quickly eroding those gains. As many file-swapping advocates note, P2P is agnostic -- it embraces all digital files, be they Beastie Boys songs, knitting patterns or high-end computer programs.
The amount of software piracy attributable to Internet file sharing is difficult to determine, in part because not every downloaded file represents a successful installation. But William Plante, director for worldwide security at Symantec, estimated that roughly half of the illegal copies of his company's software, which focuses mostly on protecting computers against viruses, stem from electronic downloads.
The Business Software Alliance estimated global losses from all software piracy at more than US$13 billion in 2002. The global software market that year was valued at US$152 billion, according to Ovum, a research and consulting firm.
"Internet piracy is the fastest-growing form of piracy," said Jeffrey Hardee, a vice president of the alliance. "It's really quite phenomenal."
Why now? One reason is the ascendance of high-speed Internet access, which makes downloading giant files feasible for millions more people. Convenience is another: the easy use and availability of free peer-to-peer software largely makes it unnecessary to learn older and more complex file-exchange systems like FTP or Usenet.
"Increasingly we're finding that people are skipping straight to P2P," the investigator for the alliance said.
The organization, which has three antipiracy monitoring centers - one here, one in Washington and one in Singapore - is loath to have the exact locations of these operations disclosed, because its investigators are sometimes subject to threats from those who object to their antipiracy efforts.
Sitting at a computer in the center, the software investigator quickly spotted a P2P site offering multiple versions of popular (and expensive) programs like Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Adobe's GoLive and even a full version of Microsoft's Office XP. Many contain text files that explain how to install the software, which has been "cracked" by hackers to defeat its copy protection, making the process almost foolproof.
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