Crime
Police on both sides of the Atlantic are investigating how thousands of CD-Roms that were due to be destroyed in Ireland turned up for sale in Germany and the US. The disks of Novell software had a retail value of roughly $1.8 million.
Novell has accused Florida-based company Computer Commodity Inc of acquiring as many as 2,000 CD-Roms containing outdated versions of its intraNetWare software. Novell also claims CCI supplied the software to MBC Enterprises in Salt Lake City for resale. "Our Irish operation is where we do most of our manufacturing and distribution for Europe, the Middle East and Africa," Martin Smith, the licensing manager for the region, said last week. "The software had been superceded by a later release." The company said its investigators in Europe traced the missing disks to Germany and the US. Software companies such as Novell and Microsoft often destroy CD-Roms containing outdated software. Unlike floppy disks, which can be easily erased with electromagnets, CDs have to be physically destroyed. Meanwhile Microsoft has clamped down on software piracy in the "information age town" of Ennis, Co Clare. It has been awarded a court injunction against Griffin Computers of Abbey Street, Ennis. "Incredible as it seems, even in Ireland's Information Age Town there are those who believe that they can escape the penalties for software pirates," says Anthony Delaney of Microsoft Ireland.
Last week the company launched its "Operation Lighthouse" programme to highlight the dangers of buying illegally loaded software on new PCs. Microsoft Ireland says many "leads" it investigated in the past year related to preloaded software on PCs' hard drives. software. Last year it took court actions against six Irish resellers "and non-litigious action against many more". Microsoft also revealed last week that it "carried out a raid" two months ago on PC reseller PC2000 of Clondalkin, Dublin. "Microsoft began investigations into the operations of PC2000 last year on a lead from a dissatisfied customer of PC2000," a spokeswoman said on Friday. "By the end of the investigation a number of other Microsoft customers had complained about software purchased by them in PC2000." On February 6th Microsoft was granted an order by the High Court under Section 20 of the 1996 Trademarks Act, and three days later a representative of Microsoft, one of its Irish lawyers and gardai went to PC2000's premises.