Is Software Piracy YouTube’s Latest Challenge?
YouTube has always had a ready supply of pirated music and movies, but now Digital Inspiration reports that pirated software is also prominent on the content sharing site.
People are using the YouTube site to not only share serial numbers of software but there are tons of step-by-step “tutorials” explaining how one can activate virtually any popular software title or video game that’s out there. Some of these videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
Digital Inspiration were looking for reviews of a newly released piece software and whilst they weren’t able to find any reviews, they were able to find plenty of offers of pirated versions of the software – which had been released just one day before.
Start typing the name of any popular software into YouTube and the 
auto-suggestions list is quickly populated with offers of pirated versions of the software and video tutorials on how to hack the software or activate it for free. Click through to the search results and you will see that many of these videos have had thousands of views.
It’s not difficult to understand the attraction of YouTube for organized software pirates. A piracy site from Russia or China is highly unlikely to get a look-in in a Google search for “Microsoft Office”, but a YouTube video on the same subject can easily rank well and pull significant traffic.
Though the software piracy trend is going to be a headache for YouTube they are not actually infringing copyright laws themselves, as they are classified as a safe harbour under common carrier legislation.
So, what can you do if you discover that pirated versions of your software are being promoted on YouTube? You will need to send them a copyright infringement notice – here’s the relevant help page.
“Ultimately though” says Jon Gillespie-Brown, software licensing expert and CEO of software licensing solutions provider Nalpeiron “if your software has been hacked and you find free copies of your license keys on YouTube it is surely time to look at you copy protection systems and consider investing in an option that offers you a better level of security.”
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