Is Russia a haven for software pirates?

21/11/2003 Written by Michael Mainville, IDG News Service

Russia’s rep­u­ta­tion as a haven for soft­ware pirates is being rein­forced by alle­ga­tions that a code thief has been ille­gally dis­trib­ut­ing a pro­gram called RaceCAD that is actu­ally a prod­uct of Texas-​based soft­ware com­pany Alibre.


Ali­bre alleges that the indi­vid­ual respon­si­ble is a for­mer employee who stole the source code for Ali­bre Design after being terminated.Ali­bre has con­tacted ISPs in Rus­sia who are host­ing a site that offers RaceCAD and requested they stop. The site remains up but a link to down­load the soft­ware is no longer working.


Ali­bre Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer J. Paul Grayson said there is no doubt the for­mer employee stole the soft­ware.


“He admit­ted it in e-​mails to me,” Grayson said. “He removed the down­load after I e-​mailed him. He offered to stop dis­tri­b­u­tion of the Eng­lish ver­sion if I agreed to let him dis­trib­ute a Russ­ian ver­sion.” Grayson declined to name the indi­vid­ual, and said the per­son was “released dur­ing a cut­back that affected our low­est per­form­ing employ­ees.”

Law Enforce­ment

Grayson said Ali­bre has been pur­su­ing its claim in the United States but has yet to start legal pro­ceed­ings. He says U.S. law enforce­ment agen­cies have con­tacted their Russ­ian coun­ter­parts about the case, but so far there has been no response from Russ­ian author­i­ties.


Ali­bre Design is a pro­fes­sional 3D com­puter assisted design appli­ca­tion designed to allow users to work alone or together over the Web.


Ali­bre inspected RaceCAD and says that the user inter­face is iden­ti­cal to that in Ali­bre Design, down to a pixel-​for-​pixel match for every icon. Var­i­ous soft­ware com­po­nents are also iden­ti­cal to that in Ali­bre Design, includ­ing ACIS, a mod­el­ing soft­ware com­po­nent tech­nol­ogy licensed to Ali­bre from Spa­tial Cor­po­ra­tion, a divi­sion of Das­sault Sys­temes SA.


The inter­nal archi­tec­ture of the soft­ware, includ­ing spe­cific class names used in Java com­po­nents of the appli­ca­tion, are the same as those in Ali­bre Design except for the replace­ment of the name Ali­bre with RaceCAD, Ali­bre main­tains.


E-​mail to the address posted on the RaceCAD Web site went unan­swered.


Ali­bre has posted adver­tise­ments on Google’s Web site in Eng­lish and Russ­ian to warn those who use the search term RaceCAD that the soft­ware is ille­gal. The com­pany is also demand­ing that those who down­loaded RaceCAD remove it from their sys­tems.


Grayson said the employee in ques­tion was a soft­ware devel­oper who had worked for Ali­bre for a lit­tle less than two years and had rou­tine access to the code. He says there was lit­tle Ali­bre could have done to pre­vent the inci­dent.


“We did a thor­ough tech­ni­cal review of our secu­rity pre­cau­tions and decided that we were doing every­thing that can rea­son­ably be done with­out seri­ously impact­ing our devel­op­ment pro­duc­tiv­ity. We feel this is anal­o­gous to a bank teller steal­ing cash from the drawer.”

Fre­quent Crit­i­cism

Rus­sia has faced fre­quent crit­i­cism for its fail­ure to pro­tect intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights. Experts say that though the coun­try has done much to develop copy­right laws, enforce­ment remains nearly nonex­is­tent. Mar­ket research firm IDC and the Busi­ness Soft­ware Alliance esti­mate that 87 per­cent of all soft­ware used in Rus­sia is pirated.


Ear­lier this month, Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin (news — web sites) urged mem­bers of his gov­ern­ment to do more to fight piracy. “I’m ask­ing the Cab­i­net together with law­mak­ers to con­tinue work­ing to per­fect leg­is­la­tion directed at strength­en­ing the fight against piracy in the sphere of intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights,” Putin said in tele­vised remarks.


Ana­lysts say Russia’s fail­ure to address con­cerns over copy­right has been hurt­ing its soft­ware indus­try, par­tic­u­larly in the increas­ingly lucra­tive global out­sourc­ing mar­ket.


This episode will do lit­tle to allay those fears, said Alex Pres­nyak, chief tech­ni­cal offi­cer of Soft­Dev SPB, a St. Petersburg-​based soft­ware devel­oper spe­cial­iz­ing in CAD pro­grams.


“This kind of inci­dent can have a very neg­a­tive effect on Russia’s rep­u­ta­tion,” Pres­nyak said. “We’re doing every­thing we can in Rus­sia to run our busi­nesses like West­ern com­pa­nies, so when some­thing like this hap­pens it can be very damaging.”

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