Is Orkut Allowing Software Piracy?

I recently came across an appalling community on Orkut, one of the Web 2.0 networking sites. The description of the community goes as follows:

"Didnt you always want a Software without paying for it.Just post a request and you would get a download link for the full version.Anonymous posts allowed for protection of members.

If downloaded, you can reply your comments about the link and/or the software so that other downloaders can read your reviews.

Please focus only on Full version Softwares Downloads and Requests in this community.No mp3, no movies, no games.

Disclaimer: You are solely responsible for your acts based on information provided in this community. Owner of this community would not be responsible for any of your conduct. If you do not accept this condition, DO NOT JOIN.
Your interest is my motivation.

DO NOT SEND REQUEST TO MODERATORS THEY WON'T BE ANSWERED."


This community has 5,620 members and counting, thanks to Orkut. Orkut's Terms of Service reads:

"We may, but shall have no obligation to, remove Materials that they determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, fraudulent, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable, or infringes or violates any party's intellectual property or other proprietary rights"

This community was started 8 months ago and if the people at Orkut incharge of monitoring illegal content were doing their job, it should have been shut down long ago. But one look at the community forum tell you that this community has "served" its members well.

There are many sites where you can find cracks for all kinds of software. I can understand that. Yes, I can. These sites are hosted in countries which have virtually no IP laws or have laws which cannot be enforced. But this is Orkut, a Google company operating from the US. Isn't someone responsible at all?

I have notified Orkut regarding this community using their "Report Abuse" tool. Let's see if anything happens. I seriously doubt that nobody has reported this community already in the past 8 months.

Oh, and by the way, there is another community started by the same guy almost a year ago. This one has 5,256 members and specializes in gaming software.

Who's Responsible?

According to 3D CAD News, more than 90% of the respondents in the CADCAMNet 2007 CAD Interoperability Survey felt that CAD vendors should be held responsible for CAD interoperability. I wonder who else could be held responsible? End users? Resellers? Trainers? Or maybe people like me who make a living by creating file conversion software?

The New IntelliCAD

It feels nice to return to blogging after more than a month of silence. If you have built a house you probably know what the last month of finishing, moving and setting up can do to you. I am still recovering...

Anyways, I was pleasantly surprised to read the news about the "New IntelliCAD". I am not sure how much this will affect users, but this is a good thing for developers. Till now developers had to use a library called SDS (Solutions Development System) to customize IntelliCAD. SDS is basically a clone of ADS (AutoCAD Development System) which was used in the good old days (AutoCAD Release 12) to customize AutoCAD. Writing code is ADS can be quite cumbersome since it is quite simlar to AutoLISP. In Release 14, Autodesk introduced ObjectARX, a far better, easier and powerful way to customize AutoCAD. ObjectARX programs run much faster than AutoLISP or ADS programs since an ObjectARX module is basically a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) which shares AutoCAD memory space and makes direct calls to AutoCAD.

At SYCODE, we write plug-ins for AutoCAD and IntelliCAD. Writing code for IntelliCAD was never as enjoyable as writing code for AutoCAD. But with the "New IntelliCAD" having an ObjectARX kind of a programming interface, that's about to change. Developers are going to be able to customize IntelliCAD in ways that they could never do before.

According to ITC (IntelliCAD Technology Consortium) President Arnold van der Weide, "the New IntelliCAD is the perfect solution for ARX based application developers who are looking for an alternative to AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT". That's more like wishfull thinking. As far as I know, it is the end users, not developers, who would want an alternative to AutoCAD. Developers simply fill an end user's requirement. Sure the addition of an ObjectARX clone to IntelliCAD will open up new avenues for developers like us to offer more powerful solutions based on IntelliCAD, but unless IntelliCAD moves out of AutoCAD's shadow, things are not going to change much. IntelliCAD needs to grow from being an AutoCAD clone to something more than AutoCAD, at least is some respects.

But maybe this is the first and all important step in that direction.