Jekyll and Hyde

I regularly read the blogs on TorrentFreak as a source of amusement and amazement and one particular blog cracked me up.

In the UK there is an organisation called FAST - the Federation Against Software Theft. They started out as a non-profit organisation in the mid to late 1980's when piracy of Commodore Amiga and Atari ST games began to kick off. Most people involved with the whole Amiga/Atari culture had heard of FAST.

At the time "warez" (a name synonymous with any kind of cracked software) were distributed via bulletin boards (BBSs). These were basically a piece of terminal software - often Amiexpress or "/X" - running on a computer at someone's house or office that people could connect to remotely via their dialup modems, which at the time were 14400 bps maximum.

BBSs tended to have an upload to download ratio of around 10 to 1, so for every megabyte you uploaded you could download ten (a megabyte was a lot - I had a 60 megabyte hard drive in my Amiga at the time!). The more elite "0-day" boards used to have lower ratios because the games on there were newer.

Anyway, FAST managed to close a few minor BBSs down and busted a few car boot sales and thats all I really heard about them until a couple of years ago when they started to phone me up at work.

I took the call from this guy and after he had introduced himself the first question he asked was, "have you heard of The Federation before?". I said, "What?". At that point I realised he had actually called them The Federation and started to laugh and just said, "oh right, yeah I have".

His next line was that he wanted to send an agent to meet with me at my office. A fucking agent. I agreed since I thought it would be a bit of a laugh to see what these dicks were really like. I obviously was aware that there must be some financial motivation behind them sending someone to see me, but figured it would just be threats of fines based on a fallacy that "a company like yours in this area" got busted with a few unlicensed copies of Windows from years ago that they didn't use and had to pay some fairytale amount of money to FAST.

We arranged the meeting for 9.30 in the morning, but their agent didn't show up until 10.15. Since the meeting was with my boss and he had a meeting at 10.45, the FAST guy was a bit disappointed to be told he had half an hour maximum.

First questions was what server OS are you using, to which I told him Linux. You should have seen his face. It was like someone had just robbed his family heirlooms. Think of all those MS licenses I could have had, but don't! He was then desperate to jump into his well rehearsed routine about how FAST campaigns for legislative changes to benefit software developers and so on. I knew all this, but what I didn't know and came to realise was that FAST also wants to sell you stuff. How can this be when they are non-profit?

Simple. They created a commercial arm, they called it FAST Limited and all their representatives, er sorry, agents, talk as if they are from the investigative part when they aren't. The cold callers are not from the Federation Against Software Theft at all, they are from FAST Limited that wants to sell you services you don't need by threatening you with investigations from it's sister organisation. I didn't know any of this until afterwards - the salesman certainly didn't tell me that he wasn't from the investigative non-profit FAST. Maybe he worked for both companies.

So what are they selling? Unsurprisingly, they want to audit your software so that you can get a FAST certification that you're not a pirate. It costs a very large amount of money for them to do this and the salesman probably gets a rather nice slice of the cake. The upside for you is that you wont have harassment from the real FAST if you sign up with them.

I find it absolutely appalling that they operate in this way. It's like paying a protection racket:

"If you pay Da Big Boss, you get no problems from Da Cops. Nobody fucks with 'The Federation', capiche?"


Guilty until proven innocent

FAST started phoning me again relatively recently and one of their messages they left was quite amusing. After the guy had left his name and number, he said "it's very important that you get back to us as soon as possible". Dot dot dot. Or what. Are "The Federation" going to bust me? I didn't bother ringing him back. After a couple of weeks they stopped harassing me.

It's quite important to remember that the investigative arm of FAST has absolutely no power whatsoever anyway.. They are paid for by software houses to attempt to disrupt piracy. They are similar in some ways to the TV licensing heavies employed by Capita that come round trying to talk their way into your house to get evidence that you have a television. They apply pressure, they tell you a story of a situation remarkably similar to your own followed by talk of huge fines and try to convince you that you have to let them inspect your premises.

If you crack and let them in, they gather evidence against you and attempt to milk whatever money they can out of you because they can cream commission from it.

Love Shack, baby!

If you check the blog from TorrentFreak you can see the laughable propaganda FAST are spewing out now. The director of FAST, John Lovelock, claims to have developed the "CCTV of the Internet" which as mentioned in the blog will simply be a BitTorrent client with extra logging. Operation Tracker plans on busting companies that are allowing their staff to use BitTorrent.

I just love these names they use that imply that they are the secret service and are watching your every move when they aren't.

You have to wonder where he's going with this. So he gets his BitTorrent client and manages to find your IP seeding. I am guessing that they can't charge you with anything unless they are able to prove that they downloaded, say, an entire game from your IP address. I guess they would have to download a few hundred for it to be worth them trying to prosecute you. No wonder he says Operation Tracker isn't going to produce instant results. Note that it's the Federation Against Software Theft - not against music theft or movie theft or book theft so get them torrents with all the latest tunes pumping at work because FAST isn't bothered about that.

What I find pretty pathetic about this is that I could be sat in Microsofts offices in London with my USB 1000GB drive plugged into a PC. I could download hundreds of gigabytes of warez using an unrestricted news feed such as Giganews in conjunction with a newsgroup search site such as Newzbin, yet the teenager sharing one or two files she downloaded from The Pirate Bay gets the knock on the door not me. Easy targets are what keep these organisations like FAST alive.

Back in the day were they busting the source of so-called stolen software? No, they were busting the guy that downloaded a few games for his own pleasure and decided to make a couple of extra quid at the car boot sale. FAST seems to be a sad joke compared to the likes of the all powerful but unsubstanstial IFPI.

But it's a futile exercise anyway. Everything that can be copied is copied. Sure some people might make a small amount of profit by selling copied stuff but does FAST have any impact on global software piracy?

About as much as this.