Symantec wins big against counterfeiters, but what about 'hearts and minds'?

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 20 December 2007 07:45

Business IT - Technology

A US court has awarded Symantec $US21 million damages against a counterfeiting network, but what does the typical user think about the issue?

The case was brought in the United States District Court in Los Angeles, against ANYI, SILI, Mark Ma, Mike Lee, John Zhang, Yee Sha, and related defendants. Ma was arrested by Chinese authorities in Shenzhen in July 2007.

"Our customers are the real winners as a result of this case," said Scott Minden, director of Symantec's legal department.

That seems self-serving. Even if we assume that everyone buying an illegitimate copy would otherwise have licensed the genuine article, do we really think that the increased sales revenue would feed back into lower prices, better support or more development?

It seems to me there are two kinds of counterfeit goods, but I'm not sure this applies to software as it does to watches and handbags, for example.

There are the 'fakes', sold at prices so low that nobody really thinks they are getting the real thing. With physical goods, the difference in quality is usually apparent, although apparently some factories are known to run off a quantity of fakes using exactly the same materials and processes they used for the genuine items they produced for the brandholder.

Then there are what I think of as 'real counterfeits', which are passed off as the genuine article at full or close to full prices.