While Sommer acknowledges that the crimes committed were not victimless, he argues that the corporate victims weren't exactly defenceless but rather large companies that are, in the main, not even based in the UK.
"While they do have a problem, there are various remedies in terms of the civil courts and how they sell and distribute software. When there's scarce funding available, in my view, protecting companies is lower down the scale than protecting children abused by online paedophile rings," says Sommer.
Other experts have also questioned whether the ponderous judicial system can really keep pace with the changing activities and trends amongst the hacking fraternity. "Trends are shifting and because crackers do this for academic pleasure, they're going to want to move onto what's trendy. Warez groups are starting to die out, and although there's still quite a lot of activity on the Web, it's mainly between hackers and so is a limited market," says Neil Hare Brown, senior security advisor at security incident response company, QCC Information Security.
Crackers have started looking for challenges elsewhere, argues Hare-Brown. While some have simply refocused their energies on working within the open source community in a more benevolent fashion, others have started concentrating on the games market, which so far has received less attention from law enforcement agencies than the commercial applications world.
"There's already an illegal burgeoning in the games market, with a good number of recent cracks on disk protection. The market is now saturated and it's easy to distribute illegal software in markets like that. People are just ripping stuff off DVDs and putting it on peer-to-peer networks," says Hare Brown.
But another problem indicates Sommer, who works as a research fellow at the London School of Economics, is that the lack of structure of warez groups means that members simply reappear elsewhere under different guises if they come under scrutiny.
"I suspect that many of the people that were in DrinkorDie are now doing other things. The US produced affinity charts trying to marry individuals to groups and it got very complex because a lot of them had different roles in different groups," he explains.
This lack of central structure means that it is very difficult to pursue a decapitation strategy or to round up ring leaders and "makes it a different type of case to investigate than drugs cartels", where there is an obvious hierarchy.
As a result, from a software publisher's point of view, Sommer believes, "going down the legal route is not the most effective means of protecting intellectual property. Mechanisms such as online registration may be rarer, but they're more effective because you can connect a software release to a real computer".
But Shona Jago, communications director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at anti-piracy group the Business Software Alliance (BSA), claims it was necessary to make an example of the DrinkorDie members to try and prevent such cases happening again.
"This group did a lot of damage while it was operating and other groups are still doing damage. I think there's a deterrent value in showing that the law can act against this type of criminal activity. It's important that people understand that this type of activity is against the law and they can get caught," she says.
Talkback
As a small software house, piracy is a major concern, and we deal with it using technology for copy protection.
While I am not a great believer in being able to apply legal enforcement of copyright, as it is usually very expensive, resulting in the legal profession gaining and all others seeing a loss. It is reassuring to note that should the need arise, the "law" can be used against individuals or organisations that deliberately set out to undermine the many years of hard work needed to produce good quality software. It is only such software that these pirates seek to copy as that is what brings (to them) the most income.
This matter should not be one of "our taxes used against copyright" but one of our rights to enfoce the law against theft of our business income, should that need be necessary, as in this case.
Hi
My name is Bill Barna and I have been developing software mainly games development since 1982. In my time as developer and producer for some of the biggest names in the industry, I have seen piracy and blatant theft on every level, warez is a word used to describe not only a group of thieves but a whole way of life for some of these people and they are all over the world. I have seen within days of a release, of a product, copies being sold on a market stall. I have used some of the anti-hacking and copy protection that is freely available to developers and I can tell you it is not worth the time and effort when it can be broken in minutes by organised pirates. The problem is that protection that is available to all of us is also available to the hackers, with this kind of information available to them how is going to stop them. Individually tailored protection for each product is the best way and this is still not secure, there’s always a way round. Protection software is not the only answer, arrest, prosecution and conviction is also needed. We need some high profile cases but we should also be sending a message to the smaller hacker and copiers that it is not ok to just do a quick copy for a friend or friends. As for the cost of prosecuting these people, it is a tiny amount compared to what it has cost us all over the past twenty plus years, if a software house closes down (and they have) and people are laid off then the cost is already past on to the public.
Perhaps legal aid should be means tested - seems to me the BSA with it's huge conglomerate members have more than enough money to fight their own battles, whereas some of the previous respondants clearly haven't. I totally object to a company like Microsoft using my tax money for, well, anything really. Actually I completely object to Microsoft, but that's another story.
It's clear that Microsoft in particular, and probably other companies as well, have benefitted massively from piracy. MS would never have gained the monopoly status they have now without it. If only those FAST adverts in the past had warned us about that!
Where the software is packaged up and sold on as the geniune item then legal aid should be available as this is pretty much fraud.
Where the software has been knowingly copied, from a simple copy for a friend to a serious operation then it should be up to the software companies to sue either of both parties for loss of earnings etc.
As a small business, if a customer doesn't pay me for work done I can't rely on the government suing them. I have to do it myself. I don't see why software companies think they should be treated any differently.