Online pirates face Redmond legal blitz

Microsoft is planning to file more than 50 lawsuits worldwide against online merchants who allegedly peddle counterfeit software on popular auction sites.

The actions include 15 lawsuits in the US, 10 in Germany, 10 in the Netherlands, and five each in France and the United Kingdom, it said. Additional cases are being filed in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Korea and Poland.

Matt Lundy, a senior attorney at Microsoft, said: "This is a worldwide enforcement against sellers of counterfeit software on online auction sites. We're finding more and more that auction sites are becoming a popular way for counterfeiters to distribute counterfeit software to consumers."

The lawsuits are part of Microsoft's continued crackdown on software piracy, which the company acknowledges cuts into its profits. According to the Business Software Alliance, about a third of all the software installed on PCs worldwide in 2005 was pirated, a multibillion-dollar loss for the software industry.

Lundy said: "Piracy is a huge problem worldwide. The goal of our enforcement is to target enterprises that traffic counterfeit software." Microsoft has filed similar suits in the past. Typically these cases end in a settlement that precludes the defendants from selling counterfeit software, he said.

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The new cases are against sellers who allegedly misused auction-site accounts, such as eBay, to sell counterfeit software to consumers and businesses. Microsoft and eBay together intervene in about 50,000 software auctions per year that are deemed to be infringing copyright, said Redmond.

In tests conducted by Microsoft of 115 software products bought on eBay, more than half were found to be counterfeit or had been tampered with. The chances of purchasing genuine, legally licensed Microsoft software on eBay is less than 50 per cent, the company said.

In its analysis of counterfeit software, Microsoft found software pirates actually meddle with the product and, in some cases, add malicious code, according to Lundy. This "leaves the door open for security issues such as identity theft", he claimed.

Joris Evers writes for CNET News.com