I'm delighted to have been asked to cover internet piracy for Forbes, not least because it's an entertaining beat as well as an important one. From the woman fined $222,000 for illegally downloading two dozen songs to the antics of file-sharing fat-boy Kim Dotcom, it's an area fraught with confusion, wild claims and frankly outrageous behavior from players on both sides of the fence.
Apple's App Store faces some buccaneering competition (Image via CrunchBase).
This week, for example, Chinese company KuaiYong has, very cheekily, launched a full web version of
While the 7659.com site is currently available only in China, the developers are promising a full English language international version running on Windows, soon.
Remarkably, the site is powered by Apple's own enterprise app distribution system, designed to allow large organizations to provide internal apps to staff. What KuaiYong has done is buy one license and then distribute apps to its customers on the pretext that they're the company's own staff. It's quite a scam: with KuaiYong claiming five million users, it would make the biggest company Apple's never heard of.
Like many pirate organizations, KuaiYong claims it's working for the good of humanity. "In China, a large number of Apple users are not very familiar with the iTunes system and how to effectively manage it," it says. "Our goal has always been about bringing Chinese Apple users with quick, convenient and pleasant IOS experience [sic]."
The claim highlights the extreme positions of both sides in the copyright game. The pirates - and, boy, do some of them like the swashbuckling image - want us to see them as the hero of the little man, spreading creative enlightenment for the masses.
Meanwhile, content holders - and, let's be clear, in this case 'content holders' generally means 'big publishers' - like to present themselves as struggling artists, producing great works that are then routinely stolen. They make ridiculous claims about the scale of their losses - indeed, the British Software Alliance's last annual survey came up with a worldwide figure of $63 billion. Hmm.
In China, though, there's no doubt that there is a massive problem - and with Apple devices on the must-have list of every Chinese consumer, the company and its developers are suffering hard. And with illegal downloads so common in the country, it's harder for companies to charge all that much for legal ones. Indeed, analyst Stenvall Skoeld says that China accounts for 18 percent of App Store downloads, but only three percent of revenues.
Ultimately, though, these low prices could end up doing the trick, offering a peace of mind that the pirates can't match. In a report from IDC last month, the analyst firm described how hundreds of tests on pirate software sources showed that more than a third led to Trojans and malicious adware. Add to that the risks of downloading updates to pirated software, and the free version starts to look a little costly. Apple's low prices in its most piracy-prone territory show it knows the best strategy for fighting fraud: making the real thing look like better value. Generally, it is.
