Black Market for Software Raises Security Issu es
 By JOHN SCHWARTZ  The New York 5/6 January 2003(published by Le Monde)

Digital piracy, often thought of as the illicit trade in music, office software and games, has moved into more dangerous territory.
A black market has emerged for scientific and engineering software powerful enough to fall under United States export restrictions. Such software can be used in a wide range of tasks like designing rockets or nuclear reactors or predicting the path of a cloud of anthrax spores.
Intellectual property “isn't just Napster,” and it “isn't just copying Madonna's songs,” one Justice Department official said, adding, “It's the software that allows you to model the fuel flow in a fighter jet.” Much of the specialized software cannot be exported legally to "pariah" nations like Libya, North Korea or Iraq. Yet Steve M. Legensky, the founder and general manager of Intelligent Light, an engineering software company in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, has found bootleg copies of his companv's software, which is bound by the export controls, being offered on the Internet alongside engineering wares from 120 other companies. Many of those companies are also subject to more stringent rules against exporting their technology to a list of countries deemed a military risk by the United States government.
The illicit copies of the software from Intelligent Light, which in licensed versions typically sells for $12,000, was being sold by Chinese entrepreneurs for$200.
The posted advertisement for the wares promised that a “step-by-step install guide and crack file make it easy to install and use!”  Which means that anyone with a modem and a little cash can evade the export control rules, even those that apply to prohibited countries.
Jeanne L. Mara, the company's president and chief executive, said, “It stinks that people can get it for nothing - but it absolutely stinks that these guys can get it for nothing.”
But when companies want to take action against a breach of the export controls, they often find themselves frustrated - whether because the United States government is reluctant to crack down on emerging trade allies like China or because software piracy over the Internet is almost impossible to stop, even when there are attempts to do so.
When software like Visual Light shows up on the wrong desktop, issues of national security come into play, said Tom Kurke, the vice president for business development and global alliances for Bentley Systems, which helps companies collaborate on and manage projects in architecture, engineering and construction. “Piracy is bad enough, but piracy in these blacklisted countries is three times worse,” he said.
At the Defense Department, a spokeswoman said that the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which monitors weapons sales and exports, did not watch individual software packages closely. “The software that we're interested in,” she said, “is either embedded code or firmware”, that is, the software that is built into chips --as part of a completed weapon system. The United States has made progress in recent years in setting up agreements with China to address law enforcement issues, Justice Department officials said.
“The Department of Justice will review any matter, and consider taking appropriate prosecutorial measures” to combat software piracy, said John G. Malcolm,deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division.