But sometimes I have unhealthy thoughts about this whole business (and it is a business, this software piracy stuff, with lots of folks making lots of money). Sometimes I wonder how it is that illegal software can be sold so openly, so brazenly, and yet when the occasional raid takes place, it seems the software police are lucky if they can round up more than one or two offenders. Were these hapless souls, by any chance, the ones who couldn't, or wouldn't, fork over some tea money? You've got to wonder. With dozens and dozens of pirated software vendors in places like Panthip or Seri, how is it that only one or two get caught? Recently Database ran a small article on the front page about a small company that was raided, and fined, with a BSA official pointing out that this was the direct result of the BSA's hotline, which folk can call to turn in users of illegal software.

I must say the story stuck in my throat like a fish bone.

They were quite plain about the fact that the story was actually a threat: the BSA are watching. You could be turned in by someone hoping to get their hands on some reward money.

When you put that side by side with the blatant selling-and profiting-of illegal software by numerous vendors from one end of the city to the other, you can't help but wonder what's going on. What's really going on.

Someone called the other day to suggest an answer to this question. What's going on, he said simply, was that software companies were collecting tea money from the vendors and looking the other way. In other words, why fight piracy when you can just collect some nice profits from the vendors once in awhile in exchange for not taking legal action against them? This idea, I must admit, has lots of attractive elements to it, not the least of which is that it frees software companies from the expense of packaging their software, and providing support for it. I've also heard, from this source and others, going back a while now, that when a company is raided, very often the choice is this: go to court, or outfit your organisation with legal software (most of that being Microsoft software).

Rumours? Could be.

To get to the bottom of the matter would require a fearless soul doing some investigative reporting: finding out where the illegal software is manufactured, how it is distributed, what happens during vendor raids (and how it is that most vendors know of the raid in advance and can thus simply close shop beforehand), as well as what happens during a raid on a company. It would require talking to executives of companies that have been raided, interviewing software company officials, spending some time with the folk over at the Economic Crime Investigation Bureau and so on.

It would open a can of very nasty worms because software piracy is big business, and lots of profit is made.

Would the conclusions resemble any of the scenarios I've outlined above? Perhaps and perhaps not. Only those involved know the details. It seems clear to me, though, that something is going on, that money is passing from hand to hand and some officials charged with protecting intellectual property may be doing anything but.

Software piracy is, basically, stupid. More charitably put, it's shortsighted. It kills any initiative young Thai programmers might feel to develop software for the local market (in other words, Thailand's Bill Gates will never see the light of day). Piracy is theft, pure and plain, and we ought not to do to others what we would not have others do to us.

As anyone who has ever bought a pirated VCD knows, the quality is often not worth the savings. I would rather pay 400 baht for a legal VCD than 150 baht for a cheap copy that sometimes is almost impossible to sit through.

And that's my other point: when the price is right, piracy wanes. Let's say a legal VCD was 2,000 baht: do you think I'm going to pay that much? Not on your life. If you've taken a look at the price of some legal software these days, you can understand why piracy thrives.

This, too, is yet another ancient bone which I've gnawed in this space quite frequently, but prices simply continue to go up with no end in sight, as if software companies couldn't care less. When you think about it, that could be precisely the truth.

- Email: [email protected]