SINGAPORE has landed the dubious honour of being among the world's top 10 hotbeds for auction site piracy, as software pirates shift their modus operandi from underground retail to Internet bidding.

In the first six months of this year, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has issued 47 takedown notices for bootleg software packages that went under the virtual hammer locally.

These included counterfeit versions of image-editing tool Adobe Photoshop, as well as security and antivirus software from McAfee and Symantec that were hawked on portals such as eBay and iOffer.

The figure places Singapore in eighth position on the BSA's global top 10 list of countries with the most software auction removals.

The issue of auction site piracy was the most prevalent in the United States, the recipient of 15,803 takedown warnings in the first half of 2008. The UK and Australia ranked second and third respectively, according to statistics provided by the BSA, an anti-piracy trade group funded by software titans such as Microsoft, Adobe and IBM.

On a worldwide basis, the number of auction listings that were removed at the BSA's request nearly tripled to 18,314 in the first six months of this year, from 6,904 in 2007. These infringing postings attempted to peddle 45,000 bootleg software products with an actual market value of US$22 million.

This issue is compounded by the growing sophistication of software pirates as some of them can now reproduce counterfeit software packaging that is near carbon copies of the real deal.

'Auction site piracy is a big problem because many pirates use it to sell illegally copied software. Buyers are duped into paying good money for software that is illegal,' said Tarun Sawney, director of anti-piracy at the BSA.

'At the very least, they are fooled into buying software that does not work or which are not what they ordered. At worst, they are unknowingly installing software that infects their computers with viruses or malicious code that compromises their personal information or exposes them to identity theft,' he told BizIT.

To address the problem, the BSA has been working with Internet auction sites such as eBay to take down infringing listings. In addition, eBay has also introduced measures such as instituting a ban on selling standalone OEM (original equipment manufacturer) titles or software that comes with a computer purchase that are not meant for resale. Such items can only be auctioned on eBay if they are sold as part of the original hardware bundle.

'Consumers should trust their instincts. If the price of a piece of software is too good to be true, it probably is. They should also look for a 'trust mark' from a reputable organisation to make sure the online retailer is reliable and has a proven track record of satisfying customers,' Mr Sawney said.

Besides Internet auctions, peer-to-peer (P2P) tools such as Gnutella and eDonkey were cited by the BSA as other major platforms for proliferating pirated software.

To curb such activity, the group is now using a 'crawler' or automated scanning tool to seek out illegal copies that are being offered across the Web.

Once the source has been identified, it can then send takedown notices to the infringer's Internet service providers (ISP).

For the first 10 months of this year, the BSA has issued 1,287 such removal notices to local ISPs. On the regional level, the number of P2P infringements totalled 98,174.

This story was first published in The Business Times on 27 November 2008.