In Russia, You Don't Fight Piracy, Piracy Is Fighting You

If you’re a fan of Captain Jack Sparrow, you should know – Russians are the best pirates. Ever. You’re probably wondering why? Recently, my firm hired a new girl to do all the paperwork, and i was to instruct her about “don’t install anything pirated here, no music files, etc., etc.” - which reminded me of one of the most renowned (in certain circles) aspects of Russian society: it’s inconsumable taste for piracy. I won’t go into much details on why it’s so widespread here (it’s a long story in itself), but let me tell you about some curious examples of what a human’s mind can cook up just to avoid getting caught or use authorities (who are trying to fight piracy) for one’s own means.

Already saying that i won’t go into much details about the reasons why Russians are so prone to piracy, i still have to tell you, that it’s as widespread here as a fire on a summer day in a dry forest after 200 days long drought. You can safely say that Russia is the country of pirates. And when the whole country is doing something, no matter how hard Microsoft or RIAA are wishing for it, you can’t prosecute tens of millions of offenders, so personal (“at home”) piracy is rather overlooked, but fighting “out of home” piracy turned out to be a very profitable business. I can’t quite remember when it began, i was too young to work back then – probably during the second 4 years of Putin’s rule. Companies that had anything illegal on their computers, started paying huge fines, and western companies rejoiced at first, but then fighting piracy turned “the Russian way”.

Imagine, that - by some miracle - your firm really has no illegal software (or you managed to delete everything just in time). A SWAT team shows up, makes you face the floor, kicks the hell out of your liver and leaves with all of your computers – because, you see, they have to check everything, just to be sure. Your firm is paralyzed without your computers, software and information. A week passes, then another, weeks turn into months, it’s been half a year now, you’re losing money, your computers are still “being processed”… What would you do to avoid losing everything? Go and pay someone, so they’ll release your computers back. And that is how they started “the anti-piracy business” in Russia.

Countless companies suffered from SWAT raids and were ripped off or went bankrupt – soon, no-one even bothered to confiscate anything, someone just would come over to your firm, show you a badge and warn that if you won’t pay a hefty sum, SWAT is coming to have a party at your office. By the way, SWAT is nicknames “маски-шоу”," “masked show” in Russia. And, of course, if you wanted to get rid of your competitor, you could always pay someone so they’ll dispatch a SWAT team to wherever your competitor is. Or, alternatively, you could shut down a paper that is writing bad stuff about a guy who sponsored your elections – SWAT teams are so handy, you see!

These things were going on pretty merrily for years, until western companies noticed with awe that their Russian divisions are being used to ransack people and to deal with inconvenient persons. So they said, “Fuck no!” and somehow managed to press authorities into changing our a little bit more than unclear piracy laws, so Adobe or Microsoft wouldn’t be dragged into another case of anti-piracy Russian harassment. Apart from people NOT using pirated software, these are still many of those who use it – even very large companies do that – and these rough times made those people to come up the most elaborate plans of avoiding being caught.

In a certain division of a very large company, there are powerful magnets fixed on server racks, where their HDDs are. And there’s a hidden button out there somewhere that activates these magnets, effectively erasing anything that was on these HDDs, and also shutting down the servers at the same time. There are scheduled daily backups of all these HDD’s content to a centralized data storage, to avoid losing anything if a SWAT team comes to check you up.

Another company used a pretty clever scheme, where a hard drive was put into NAS and connected to a WI-FI router and shared to a network, when the said HDD physically was outside of the firm’s office, hidden in a nearest garage. Another guy told me how they do it in his office: Windows desktop is replace with one running on a remote server, with a backup to the said desktop. When the server shuts down, all computers are showing crystal-clear legal Windows copies, with absolutely no software, like when Windows was just installed.

Russia is full of sneaky bastards, you see.