Is the Trinidad and Tobago Government a Software Pirate?
Two weeks ago I was doing a vanity search for Cogniview’s name (for those of you that are not regular readers – Cogniview is the company that hosts this blog and the maker of a PDF to XLS converter).
Back to the story… I was absentmindedly browsing through the search results when I noticed something funny right after Cogniview’s Wikipedia Article…
Well… It seems that for some reason, the Trinidad and Tobago foreign office was selling one of our products. And at a discount. Funny, I thought to myself, I don’t recall signing a distributor agreement with the Trinidad and Tobago government. And we NEVER sell at a discount. So I followed the link to see what’s up:
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Apparently, someone at the foreign office of Trinidad and Tobago has set up a store selling pirated software copies. I kept looking around and found out that all the software sold on this site was either bought at “an auction” or is a discontinued product line…
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Well… I can tell you that we never sell software at ‘auctions’ – whatever those are – and we did not discontinue any of our product lines. Besides, I am guessing that Adobe didn’t discontinue it’s Acrobat product line and it’s still being sold at huge discounts on the Trinidad and Tobago software store -
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Further investigation into the matter shows that the guys (or gals) at the ‘Trinidad and Tobago software store’ take fraud very seriously…
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I am pretty used to our software getting hacked and sold at a discount. That’s the price you pay when you sell software, I guess. But we found out that most people are decent and don’t go looking for pirated copies. (Either that, or they are afraid of the viruses that are installed along with those copies). But this is the first time an actual government office site was used to steal our products.
I tried contacting the Trinidad and Tobago foreign office several times but to no avail.
So… What do you think we should do next? Can we ask that the Trinidad and Tobago official site be de-listed from Google? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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Posted on February 15, 2010 by Yoav Ezer
Filed Under Uncategorized
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9 Responses to “Is the Trinidad and Tobago Government a Software Pirate?”
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Perhaps everyone reading this could contact the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of Foreign Affairs via this page http://foreign.gov.tt/pages/feedback.php
Maybe they’ll wake up after the first 20 emails.
Alternatively there must be someone out there who could come up with a DoS.
I Don’t think we should resort to a DOS (kinda illegal). But the feedback idea is lovely. Thanks.
Trying to think what explanations there could be and coming up short … Could they have been hacked? Is it possible to get a .gov.tt domain without being in gov? Could it be like when WordPress site was hosting lots of spam because someone offered a great wad of cash to “host some content”?
I think you can probably contact the US Commerce Dept and/or State Dept for help with this issue. It’s abuse of international commerce accords and they may be able to pursue the matter on your behalf (as well others affected).
You should contact Adobe. They probably have a team of people who do nothing but fight piracy. If they get the site taken down, your stuff comes down too.
I, for one, think it is your responsibility to ask Google to de-list Trinidad and Tobago. It is only one small step and the internet is huge with many loopholes, but you have to start somewhere.
Thanks
@Chris – My thought is that some low level IT employee might be running a ‘side business’. If only they would answer my emails we could have found out.
Miguel – You are probably right, but the last time I tried to approach a government agency about something similar the response was along the lines of… “You must be kidding. we have tons of really important stuff to do. Shooo. Go away”. I kid you not.
Dick – Very good idea. I’ll try that.
Gaile – If all else fails I’ll do that.
For what it’s worth I’d like to point out that the web site’s design in the software part matches the design of the official government part, in color theme, etc.
So at a glance it does not look like somebody hacked into their site and implanted it without the sysadmin’s knowledge.
I would go with Yoav’s thought above, that it’s the work of an IT employee..
However, someone should have figured it out and put an end to it.
Google’s cache is recent, and the Wayback Machine has no cached version of it, so it’s going to be hard to figure out how long this operation is running.
http://blogs.escolagavina.com/400colps/?p=678|2