BOA CONSTRICTED

Likewise, you might run a company in a competitive field where
you must have access to, say, an Autodesk product. To buy the requisite
software and licences for your needs from the company might weigh
in at almost $20,000, but if you bought them from this Ukrainian
chap on eBay, your total outlay would be $800. Let us be frank: it may
be illegal, but it's tempting!

Since the 1970s, when software started to become commercially
available for the first time, manufacturers have tried in vain to develop
technology that can prevent it from being copied (as they have also
attempted with CDs and DVDs). No such technology has ever lasted
more than a few days before being cracked by one of the tens of thou-
sands of hackers and crackers around the world. It has proved to be
one of the most quixotic branches of the high-tech industry over the
past three decades.

The hackers of Eastern Europe played a particularly important role
in cracking security devices placed on software. In the 1980s, before
the fall of communism, the Soviet Union had tasked various allies in
its trading bloc, COMECON, to develop a personal computer and a
software industry - notably Bulgaria and East Germany. The defining
characteristics of communist computers were common to all Eastern
Bloc consumer products: they were ugly and constantly breaking down.
The challenges posed to the region's nascent computer engineers were
so considerable that they developed an exceptional ingenuity in over-
coming glitches and bugs.

Furthermore, the software factories that the East Europeans built in
the 1980s could not compete with Silicon Valley during the 1990s after
the fall of the Berlin Wall - there was no money to invest in research
or equipment. But the powerful new organised-crime syndicates that
exerted such a huge influence over the economies of the former commu-
nist countries saw the factories as a genuine opportunity. First, they
acquired these facilities (usually by foul means rather than fair), then
they employed those talented engineers to produce counterfeit software
on an industrial scale. Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia set the pace, with
the Romanians not far behind.

So when Autodesk spotted that a single seller on eBay was shifting
significant numbers of a counterfeited version of their product from
Ukraine to buyers in the United States, they naturally felt obliged to
do something about it. After some deliberation they called the FBI,