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A software industry trade group is trying to encourage buyers of pirated software on auctions sites such as eBay to tattle on the counterfeiters. The Software & Information Industry Alliance, which represents companies like Adobe, Symantec and McAfee, is offering rewards of up to $500 to whistle blowers. The money is to be used to buy legitimate replacement software.

The S&IIA says eBay is not doing enough to fight software piracy. eBay decline an invitation to speak on Future Tense, but sent the following statement:

The sale of counterfeits is an industry wide problem both offline and online. eBay doesn’t like counterfeits any more than brands do. We strive to continually improve the eBay experience for our buyers. eBay pioneered fighting counterfeits on the internet, launching our first anti-counterfeiting initiative, the VeRO program, back in 1998. This enables eBay to partner and collaborate with over 18,000 rights owners that help us remove counterfeits from the site.

We take action against reported counterfeit and fraudulent sellers, and have a dedicated team of VeRO representatives, the FIT team (Fraud investigation), and others, who work with rights owners and law enforcement around the globe to enable them to protect rights and take action against criminal behavior.

"Counterfeit software is illegal and not welcome on eBay, as it reduces trust between our buyers and sellers," said Matt Halprin, vice president of Trust & Safety for eBay Inc. "As our business has grown and the challenges of global counterfeiting have become more complex, cooperation with law enforcement and rights owners has become more critical — we need to fight the sale of counterfeit goods together."

Further to the SIIA's demands for eBay to ban the BIN (Buy It Now) functionality, since we introduced the specific seller restrictions - requiring PayPal Verification, placing volume restrictions on the number of items they can sell, elimination of 1 day and most 3 day auctions and limits on cross border sales), focusing on items and categories most favored by counterfeiters, our expectations are that this will significantly reduce the opportunity of potential counterfeiters to abuse BIN.

For example, one of the restrictions is around volume limits so this obviously reduces the amount of items for sale an individual seller can list within a set time period. This limits the amount of sales activity before a rights owner, or eBay, detects and removes the suspected counterfeit item.