Piracy

The first time the pair of Shanghai private detectives came to this remote village known as China's pen capital, they ran into big trouble. They were on a mission, along with provincial police, to raid a factory and seize thousands of counterfeit Parker pens. They made it inside the building and found the bogus goods. But then a mob of locals arrived, hemming them inside and barricading the only street leading out of town.

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., which liberated radio shock jock Howard Stern from the federal decency standards that he felt had shackled him, is finding that freedom's just another word for $500 million to lose. Since Jan. 9, when Stern debuted on Sirius, pirated versions of the shows have been made available for free via several online file-sharing networks just hours after Stern signs off. The New York-based broadcaster signed Stern to a five-year, half-billion-dollar contract in 2004.

Microsoft Corp. estimates it lost about $14 billion last year to software piracy -- and those may prove to be the most lucrative sales never made. Although the world's largest software maker spends millions of dollars annually to combat illegal copying and distribution of its products, critics allege -- and Microsoft acknowledges -- that piracy sometimes helps the company establish itself in emerging markets and fend off threats from free open-source programs.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, more than 140 law enforcement officers descended on Santee Alley in what officials described as their largest raid ever on the quirky downtown shopping district famous for selling cheap knockoffs. Police and prosecutors on Friday said officers seized more than 50,000 items, including pirated CDs and DVDs as well as near-perfect reproductions of designer merchandise.

She was the scourge of Spanish and English merchants. "Notorious by land and sea," her English enemies said. Queen Elizabeth I even put a price -- 500 pounds -- on her head. Grace O'Malley, a 16th century pirate, was feared from Ireland's Galway Bay to Hampton Court in England. A clan chieftain and a sea captain, she once commanded 200 men and a flotilla of galleys and held sway in the west of Ireland in an era when most women led constricted lives.

A few years ago, when a friend offered 15-year-old Evan Collins a compact disc of illegally downloaded music, Collins turned him down flat. "Me and my parents used to download music for free," said Collins, who lives in Bloomington, Minn. "But we decided it was like stealing from musicians. So I don't take stolen music from friends, either." But later that year, when Collins met a girl he liked, he made her a CD filled with songs by Linkin Park, Blue Man Group and Eiffel 65.

A major porn producer filed a lawsuit Monday against an X-rated knockoff of YouTube, alleging that it profited from piracy by allowing its users to post videos that include copyrighted material. Vivid Entertainment Group filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court against PornoTube and its parent, Data Conversions Inc., which does business in Charlotte, N.C., as AEBN Inc.

About a week before Christmas, I took a stroll around the Los Angeles Toy District and bought a pirated DVD. As I wrote on Dec. 21, curious about the quality of the merchandise for sale on the street, I shelled out five bucks for a copy of the movie "District 9," which was still days away from being available in your local retail store. As I've been informed, quite properly, by readers in and around the movie industry, that casual act made me part of a global problem that is killing jobs and eliminating opportunities for creative people everywhere.

Susan Philips has a conscience so sensitive to ethical failings that she feels guilty if she leaves her shopping cart adrift in the grocery store parking lot. Her influence is reflected in her elder daughter's career choice: Miriam Philips, 22, wants to be a rabbi. On at least one moral dilemma, though, mother and daughter are on opposite sides. To Susan, downloading music on the Internet without permission is wrong. To Miriam, it's just what you do when you go to college.

To help keep their videos off YouTube, media companies may need to give their videos to YouTube. YouTube parent Google Inc.'s long-promised method for reducing piracy, unveiled Monday, relies on TV networks, movie studios and other content owners to provide the video-sharing service with master copies of their videos. YouTube won't post those videos. Rather, it plans to use software to find unique characteristics in the clips so it can detect copies posted by YouTube users without permission.

A Santa Barbara software maker has filed a $2.2-billion lawsuit against the Chinese government and several Chinese technology firms, accusing them of conspiring to steal and disseminate the U.S. firm's Internet filtering technology. Cybersitter, also known as Solid Oak Software Inc., alleged in a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles that Chinese software makers stole thousands of codes to develop a controversial Internet filtering program that was to be installed on all personal computers in China by July 2009.

About a week before Christmas, I took a stroll around the Los Angeles Toy District and bought a pirated DVD. As I wrote on Dec. 21, curious about the quality of the merchandise for sale on the street, I shelled out five bucks for a copy of the movie "District 9," which was still days away from being available in your local retail store. As I've been informed, quite properly, by readers in and around the movie industry, that casual act made me part of a global problem that is killing jobs and eliminating opportunities for creative people everywhere.

National American University has agreed to drop its lawsuit accusing a California pornography provider of trademark violations and cyber piracy for its use of Naughty American University and the acronym NAU, an attorney for the school said. The school's parent company, Dlorah Inc., filed the federal complaint in Rapid City, S.D., where the company is based, against La Touraine Inc., a Nevada corporation based in San Diego. Sam Kerr, general counsel for National American University, said La Touraine had agreed to stop using the school's trademark.

The world's most popular source for illegal music and movie downloading is going legit, but it's far from certain whether consumers or big media companies will embrace it. Pirate Bay, a Sweden-based website that indexes and links to millions of unauthorized copyrighted files on the Internet, has agreed to be acquired by Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish operator of Internet cafes, for $7.8 million.

Hollywood calls it "rent, rip and return" and contends that it's one of the biggest technological threats to the movie industry's annual $20-billion DVD market -- software that allows users to copy a film without paying for it. On Friday, industry lawyers urged a federal judge to bar RealNetworks Inc. from selling software that allows consumers to copy their DVDs to computer hard drives, arguing that the Seattle company's product is an illegal piracy tool.

The sole surviving Somali pirate from the hostage-taking of an American ship captain arrived to face trial in New York, smiling for reporters. Abduhl Wali-i-Musi was handcuffed and had a chain wrapped around his waist. His left hand was heavily bandaged from a wound he suffered during the skirmish on the ship two weeks ago. Wali-i-Musi is the first person to be tried in the United States on piracy charges in more than a century. A law enforcement official familiar with the case said Wali-i-Musi was being charged under two obscure federal laws that deal with piracy and hostage-taking.

When Adam Hendricks wants an obscure film that isn't available on Netflix, he isn't exactly out of options. The 26-year-old West Hollywood resident turns to one of the dozens of "torrent tracking" websites that index and make searchable the hundreds of millions of files -- some legal, most not -- distributed on the Web via the BitTorrent file transfer technology. "It's really easy," he said, listing a number of popular sites. "I use isoHunt first and Pirate Bay sometimes.

Movie and TV piracy in Africa is so rampant that some production houses are refusing to distribute in their home countries, preferring to sell their shows only to diaspora Africans in better regulated markets. Thus West Africans in Paris lap up plot lines thick with polygamy, sorcery and secret love potions set in a claustrophobic courtyard in Ivory Coast's main city, Abidjan, while their relatives back home miss out. "We noticed there is a huge market for TV sitcoms but it was mostly from Nigeria, the U.S. or Brazil.

The World Trade Organization has largely sided with the United States in a dispute with China over product piracy, according to official documents released Monday. The ruling, which confirms an interim decision in October, takes Washington one step closer to being able to seek compensation from China for the billions of dollars that U.S. companies say they lose through piracy each year.