FROM THE ARCHIVES: November 11, 2002 By: Lee Gomes
 

Small-Time Software Pirates
Turn Into Political Prisoners

Rob Rothberg, currently serving an 18-month sentence in a federal prison, is an only-in-America variety of political prisoner. He was jailed at the behest of a powerful Washington special-interest group.

As he makes his way about his daily chores at a minimum security facility in Ayer, Mass., Mr. Rothberg occasionally wears a prison-issued sweatshirt on which he has written "PWA" in big, black letters.

It's meant to be a conversation piece. Other inmates -- drug dealers, embezzlers, crooked politicians -- ask about the acronym. Mr. Rothberg then gets to tell of being busted for his involvement with Pirates With Attitude. It was an online group where people swapped software just like people used Napster to swap music.

"When they hear that, they say, 'You're in jail for THAT? That's ridiculous!' " says Mr. Rothberg.

Ridiculous, maybe, but that's how it is these days with copyright laws, thanks to some muscle-flexing in Congress by U.S. software makers.

Back in 1997, software companies managed to persuade lawmakers that noncommercial, aka "recreational," software piracy like Mr. Rothberg's was a mortal threat, and that its practitioners should face jail time.

Software piracy, of course, has always been illegal. But before the law change, you couldn't go to jail for piracy unless you were actually selling the stuff. Swapping software online, like what happened with music via Napster, was a civil offense. If busted for it, you might get a restraining order from a software company.

But you would not, as Mr. Rothberg did back in 2000, receive a dinnertime visit from FBI agents who lead you away in handcuffs.

The hundreds of piracy groups like Mr. Rothberg's PWA's have been around since the first PC. You have probably used software with such origins. The groups are part hobby, part adolescent competition to see which group has the most stuff, regardless of whether anyone actually uses any of it. Selling any of the programs is anathematic.

In lobbying for the law change, the software industry made all sorts of silly but nonetheless unchallenged claims about piracy's economic consequences -- such as the 100,000 jobs they said were being lost on account of it. (Their job-loss formula was, if nothing else, simple: If software companies would be making, say, 15% more sales without piracy, they would also be needing 15% more employees.)

Once the industry was successful in criminalizing something that for years had been a civil matter, police and prosecutors rushed into action. Bust a bunch of college kids for swapping Windows XP and you get to issue a press release about cracking down on "computer crime." Most people will think you're rounding up hackers who steal credit-card numbers.

Like most of the others in the PWAs, the 35-year old Mr. Rothberg worked in the computer industry, managing technical projects. In the early '90s, he heard about the PWAs from the computer bulletin boards popular in those pre-Web times. He drifted into the group, and eventually became its leader. He urged on other members to make sure every conceivable program -- games, business software, utilities -- was available for PWAs. After a few years, he got tired of the scene and drifted away.

The log files the group kept ended up being a big neon sign pointing to his front door, along with more than a dozen other group members.

Even though he pleaded guilty, Mr. Rothberg ended up amassing more than $200,000 in legal bills. He is one of three PWA members who got jail time, largely because of his leadership role. Other PWA-like busts have followed, some with even longer sentences.

You could be next. Someone trading software on post-Napster services like Kazaa could, if they have enough software on their machine, be treated just like Mr. Rothberg.

Everyone agrees that software piracy is a bad thing. So is not paying your credit-card bills. But people don't go to jail for that. The software industry, in effect, used its clout in D.C. to get the police do its dirty work.

Mr. Rothberg doesn't try to justify what he did. But he draws a distinction between his sort of piracy and people out there selling bootleg programs. He thinks he should have gotten a civil-style warning the first time, then faced jail if he persisted, which he says he wouldn't have dreamed of doing.

Mr. Rothberg adds that he can't help notice that he's now working for 12 cents an hour as a prison clerk, while Napster's Shawn Fanning, who did something morally similar, is currently co-producing a Hollywood movie about his life story.

"What I did was wrong, but the punishment is absurd," says Mr. Rothberg.

Not that he's fostering any sort of rebellion. Asked what advice he'd give to someone now in the piracy scene, he answers quickly, "Get the hell out."