Spam salesmanship

In fact, Symantec officials say that's one of the things that have made their investigation of the SystemWorks spams slow going. William Plante, Symantec's director of worldwide security and brand protection, says the SystemWorks spammers fall into two broad categories: credit card scammers who ship nothing and spammers who mostly ship counterfeit product produced in Asia. "There are a number of gangs who are just using the Norton products as bait to skim credit cards, and those cases we turn over to the credit card companies. With those who are actually selling product though, we have to purchase it and have it in hand to determine if it's legitimate or counterfeit," Plante says.

Once Symantec makes a determination that the spammer is selling counterfeit product, Plante says his staff is using every means at their disposal to go after the culprits. But the Florida spammer is a good example of how difficult that is. "We used the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] to shut his Web site down several times, but he just pops up again with another one a few days later," Plante says. "He's a slippery guy."

Plante says some of the spammers may actually believe they are selling legitimate gray market software, but in fact the vast majority is counterfeit. "Further up the ladder, [the spammers' suppliers] certainly know it's counterfeit," Plante says. "The reason they can afford to sell it to the spammers at $7 or $8 per CD is because they're getting it from Asia for as little as 50 cents a disk. So they've got a terrific margin. Until we implement DRM [digital rights management], the problem is not going to go away."

Uh-oh. I'm willing to accept that Symantec is a victim here, but DRM technology is a cure that carries the potential of being worse than the illness. There's no guarantee it really will make that much of a dent in the flow of counterfeit software. But it might very well eliminate white boxes, gray markets, and all manner of perfectly legitimate secondary markets, along with forcing legitimate customers to jump through more hoops just to install and maintain the products they buy.

I have little sympathy for anyone who buys anything from a spammer, and the spam plague is already threatening to rob much of the Internet's potential. If the spam plague helps justify software publishers' plans to lock down their products in ways that restrict customers' rights, the slime who spam will have done us an even greater disservice than we ever expected.