V.i. Labs, software protection and business intelligence vendor, has upgraded its flagship anti-Piracy platform 'CodeArmor Intelligence' to include geo-location. The update will show businesses who is pirating their Intellectual Property (IP), and where in the world they are. The aim is to turn pirates into sales leads.
New anti-Piracy tool aims to geo-locate software pirates (IMG: V.i. Labs)
“Piracy is a huge issue with software vendors today. It’s due to the emerging market growth, the demand for the software globally, high Internet bandwidth, and expertise in reverse engineering. Some estimated peg this problem to be a $40 billion dollar problem,” said Victor DeMarines, Vice President of Products for V.i. Labs.
This is why the company created CodeArmor Intelligence. It converts the “piracy problem into a new source of business leads and intelligence. It essentially gives software vendors the ability to track and recover lost revenue due to piracy,” DeMarines said.
Pirates-to-profits jokes aside, the new tracking technology is interesting to say the least. Actually, to be honest, V.i. Labs has created something cool. This is what you would call innovative, even if you want to question the reasoning or whether or not it would actually work.
The improvements to CodeArmor Intelligence work by taking advantage of Salesforce.com’s cloud offering Force.com to create a vendor piracy dashboard. From there, vendors can identify who is pirating their software and, by using Google Maps, locate them no matter where they are.
Vendors, whose entire business model is developing software, have a right to know who pirates it and to also protect their IPs -- there is no one who lives in the real world that would argue against that. Theft is theft no matter how you spin the issue. However, to some, the issue is not protecting IP, the issue is making things up, such as the cost of piracy to the software industry, and squeezing money out of businesses who in all reality failed to understand complex licensing agreements.
The problem is that most of those who lobby against pirates, such as the BSA (Business Software Alliance), tend to make things look worse than they really are. Earlier last month, the BSA and IDC released a report that said software piracy and illegal distribution hit a record high in 2008, resulting in losses of over $9 billion USD (the report also claimed that 20 percent of all software piracy is carried out in the U.S.).
The BSA has been slammed for false numbers in the past. The largest issue many have taken with the reported figures is that the BSA equates every copy of a pirated program to a lost sale. This simply cannot be the case. Moreover, they are starting to move in the direction of including available pirated software, even if it isn’t in use but just available online, as a lost sale. In 2006, shortly after another BSA report on piracy was making rounds in the press, the New York Times had a great quote from IDC.
John Gantz, director of research for IDC, told the New York Times that: "perhaps one of 10 unauthorized copies might be a lost sale. In developing nations, he explained, many users cannot afford software imported from the West. Instead of describing the $29 billion number as sales lost to piracy, he said, 'I would have preferred to call it the retail value of pirated software.'"
This year, it was actually the BSA itself that admitted the numbers were skewed.
"I concede that, in this model, we express the value of pirated software in terms of retail value of what's being displaced. We assume 100 percent of the software would be replaced and we calculate the retail value of that," BSA VP of communications Dale Curtis told Ars Technica in an interview just after the release of the BSA’s 2009 numbers. "I don't know how much will be replaced or not. A lot of it will be replaced."
In the same interview with Ars Technica, Curtis pointed out that anyone who focuses on exact numbers is missing the point. "We're not measuring this like speed of light or the size of a baseball field," he said. "The underlying problem remains the same."
How then, if the BSA is not going to release accurate figures and numbers, can it honestly expect anyone to take piracy seriously? How can any business or business owner be expected to care about software piracy when the figures and reports they read are exaggerations or, in the case of Canada, simply made up? According to the 2009 report from the BSA, piracy in Canada declined from 33 to 32 percent. However, those numbers, after some research from Michael Geist, were discovered to be nothing more than a guess.
Piracy is a serious problem, V.i. Labs creates software that helps protect a company’s IP, so when it comes to anti-Piracy movements, V.i. Labs is not the bad guy. Again, this is because a company has a right to protect what it has created -- and, quite simply, piracy is theft.
However, fear-driven reports from lobbyist groups that use jumped up figures do nothing to help a business looking to make up for software losses. Given that most of the money the BSA collects on fines and penalties when it goes after a company that uses pirated software rarely goes to the vendor that created it, it's a no-win situation.
V.i. Labs might be on to something with its technology, but only its customers will know if the geo-tracking really works. To learn more about V.i. Labs, check out its official Web site.
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