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Operation Fastlink Nets 1000s in Pirate Sting
womanfiend writes "The Iowa City (Iowa) Press Citizen has been reporting the last two days about "'Operation Fastlink,' a multi-national investigation launched in April." Apparently, the investigation has netted a local college student hosting 13,000 titles worth a bundle of money both in simple value and liability for as many times as logs show the titles were downloaded. According to the P-C: "...'Operation Fastlink,' which targeted the underground community's hierarchy with [FBI] agents conducting more than 120 searches within 24 hours in 27 states and 11 foreign countries. At the time, authorities identified nearly 100 people as leaders or high-ranking members of international piracy groups."
Sounds like somebody's in deep doo doo."
The wholesale looting of others intellectual property is a very destructive thing. Of those 13,000 titles you can very sure that among them were titles by the non-industry powerhouses.
I've worked as an employee and contractor to a number of small niche players who wrote popular useful software but were ultimately forced out of business due to the direct and indirect effects of piracy.
It is criminal what is being done to some of these companies. When you have a potential customer base of perhaps 5,000 you really need to make sure that you do exactly what your customers want.
I helped organize a QA and customer satisfaction drive for a niche regional software provider. We surveyed every user of the software. Took suggestions and complaintants and feedback on every bit of the application. All told we collected, ranked, anaylzed and implemented 6,500 changes ranging from minor tweaks to major rewrites. It was an 18-month project. Every issue was documentated, analyzed, and every user, every issue recieved a human-authored note that dealt in depth with the issue.
At the request of several users the licensing was vastly simplified even though it meant - at best - a 15% decline in revenue. A solid base of the users/sysadmins complained about the technical measures used to prevent licensing violations. They were removed completely and the honor system was instituted.
After the project, the application won numerous awards within its industry. User satisifaction with the application went from 62% to 98% between the versions. The average site had about 10%-20% smaller licensing costs. Support calls dropped 50% in 3 months. A comprehensive professional written and edited user manual was given to every user, and a robust feature request/enhancement/bug tracker went live.
It was vastly successful. Yet, within 12 months of that release, the company closed its door, and released the code from escrow to the clients. 40 programmers, QA, and support people lost their jobs, and the owner - a very nice woman - was financially ruined. A number of the customer sites also went belly up - as many as 10.
The software was an investment to be sure, but allowed you to run an efficent, competitive, and focused organization. When the anti-piracy features were removed competitors with pirated editions sprang up, offering similair services at lower prices - part of which was because the new enterprises could escape making an investment in software that their competitors did have to make.
The fact is that in this situation everyone knows what happened. A few key employees from one established place took a copy of the server with all the data files and software and all that, and went to establish a competitor in an adjoining state. Same product, 25% cheaper. That 25% is almost entirely made up by the fact that they did not license the software everyone else has to pay for.
In this case, private litigation is useless and slow. The software company and several established reputable companies ended up being run out of business by a truly awful display of poor ethics.
Pirates destroyed the lives of many honest people here. This software package that was cracked and passed around so viciously on many of the big warez networks was the lifeblood of a vibrant partnership of interests. And it was trashed so that a quick buck could be made by a few destructive people (who ended up closing up shop when the easy money was over; they didn't charge enough or save enough to make it through the long slow periods that are inherent in the industry).
Bottom line is that this was a true shame. And it's not all that uncommon. Government acts on behalf of people, and many times, that means acting on behalf of businesses. It's sure easy to be pissed about the FBI spending moneny on anti-piracy, but it has very real economic effects.
Law-enforcement, including the FBI, is generally well-funded. There really isn't a great battle for r