Police and trading standards officers have raided a South London
address at the centre of an operation which sold pirated business
software worth millions of pounds on Web auction sites.
The packages, which are described as new and original, have been
offered for sale in a series of major auctions on well-known
auction sites over the past few months.
Thousands of premium business packages including Microsoft
Server 2000, Office 2000, Visual Basic and Adobe Photoshop have
been advertised at cut price rates on QXL, Ebay and other
sites.
Trading standards officers from Southwark and Lewisham, and
officials from Adobe and Microsoft, raided a house in Deptford on
Wednesday last week, following a four-month investigation into the
auctions.
Officers seized tens of thousands of pounds worth of pirated
software, including Adobe Autodesk, Corel Macromedia, and Microsoft
products.
A laptop computer, a CD writer and documents detailing illegal
software auctions on QXL, Yahoo, Ebay, Ricardo and EBid were also
seized.
The raid, the culmination of a joint investigation by the
Business Software Alliance (BSA) and trading standards officers,
follows a series of complaints from auction-site customers.
"The BSA and trading standards have been following the
activities of the individual vendor for some months," said BSA
legal counsel Margo Miller. "This raid is just one element of a
worldwide auction site clean-up campaign by the BSA."
The auctions have raised alarms among small businesses which
often use the Web as a time-saving way of buying software and other
essentials. Within the space of five weeks a pirating network
attempted to sell packages worth an estimated £3.2m in more than
400 auctions on QXL, Computer Weekly has established.
"A lot of our members are using sites like this. They haven't
got time to go out shopping for software. We will be raising this
with the e-minister Patricia Hewitt," said David Hands, director of
the Federation of Small Businesses last month.
A man has been cautioned and faces possible charges under
section 93 of the Trade Marks Act - an offence which carries a
maximum prison sentence of 10 years.