Syndicates, Sharks, and Software

Taiwan crime gangs: they're everywhere you want to be. The Independent describes an environmentalist out to save the world's sharks from the idiotic and wasteful practice of eating shark fin soup. Who is running the business? Some of Taiwan's finer contributions to the human gene pool.....

Protecting sharks is a risky business. In making Sharkwater, Stewart confronted the multi-billion pound shark-finning industry and uncovered a world of corruption, espionage and organised crime syndicates.

Six years ago Stewart joined the radical Sea Shepherd conservation group to help the Costa Rican government stop the long-line fishermen who were hunting inside the country's marine reserves. Led by fellow Canadian Paul Watson (who has been battling the Japanese whaling fleet in the Antarctic this winter) Sea Shepherd has earned itself a reputation for being one of the most aggressive and uncompromising conservation groups, unafraid to ram or scupper illegal fishing vessels.

But instead of filming sharks, Stewart found himself immediately pitched into a battle with an illegal Guatemalan fishing vessel. Despite being invited by the Costa Rican government to do precisely what they were doing, by the time Sea Shepherd made it to the mainland the police were waiting for them and arrested the crew for seven counts of attempted murder. Skipping house arrest, Stewart donned an undercover camera and found out why their host government had turned against them. In the private docks of a nearby town he secretly filmed what he describes as an international Taiwanese crime ring that still controls the global shark-fin trade.

Convinced that they would be unable to receive a fair trial in a country so involved in the trade, Sea Shepherd made a break for the Galapagos Islands and managed to outrun the heavily armed coastguards that desperately tried to turn them back.

"The days of letter-writing and petitioning are over," Stewart says. "If we were overfishing our seas by 10 per cent then maybe I would be critical of someone like Paul Watson, but right now we are overfishing by somewhere in the region of 1,000 per cent."

Beyond gun-toting excitement of eco-vigilantism, there is a serious message to Stewart's film: the extinction of the one of the world's top predators could have catastrophic consequences for the ecosystem of all the oceans.

Meanwhile, a Taiwanese organized crime syndicate had been the center of the world's Microsoft software counterfeiting, until busted last week:

Near-perfect knockoffs of 21 different Microsoft programs began surfacing around the world just over a decade ago. Soon, PCs in more than a dozen countries were running illegal copies of Windows and Office, turning unwitting consumers into criminals and, Microsoft says, exposing them to increased risk of malicious viruses and spyware.

The case began to turn in 2001 when U.S. Customs officers seized a shipping container in Los Angeles filled with $100 million in fake software, including 31,000 copies of the Windows operating system.

From there, Microsoft pushed the investigation through 22 countries. Local law enforcement officials seized software, equipment and records, and made arrests. A court in Taiwan handed down the last of the major sentences in December. Microsoft estimates the retail value of the software the operation generated at $900 million.

"That is a tremendous accomplishment," said James Spertus, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who later led anti-piracy efforts for the Motion Picture Association of America. "There are only going to be a few cases like this a decade."

Now Microsoft is eager to talk about the experience because taking down that operation — responsible for about 90 percent of the fake software the company found between 1999 and 2004, more than 470,000 disks — didn't actually stop piracy. It just left room for more counterfeiters to rise. Microsoft hopes would-be pirates will think twice if they know how far it will go to protect the computer code worth billions in revenue each quarter.

The fraudsters faked holograms, even subtle threads that were planted to make the paper counterfeit-proof. And thanks to Microsoft, which realizes its efforts were pointless from the perspective of suppression -- though they may yield a PR boost -- counterfeiting is now just another Taiwan industry that has shifted from Taiwan to China:

After the Taiwan raids, the number of high-end Microsoft counterfeits dropped — but only for a while. A Chinese operation that stepped in to meet the worldwide demand for cut-rate software cranked out an estimated $2 billion in copies before it was brought down in July after a six-year investigation by the FBI and China's Public Security Bureau.

Whoa. If only the same resources were put into protecting sharks as well as software rights. (thanks to reader Macca for the shark story)

[Taiwan]