A Tale Of Two Different Forms Of Piracy - Technological vs Commodity Items

On Friday I was treated to the news that several academics had been arrested for bilking Georgia Tech University out of up to $2M in equipment and patent proceeds. These charges broke earlier this summer. Today the criminal prosecution process was initiated after the investigation was concluded.

The framework of the story is that greed motivated several members of the GA Tech academic research staff to set up a series of shell corporations overseas so that they could submit fake invoices and also could avoid assigning patents to the institution as Tech would also be entitled to the proceeds from licensing. The centerpiece of all of this was a new high speed computer processor that was developed by the players involved.

Upon viewing this I was disappointed that these men would exploit the recent investments in public/private partnerships that was set up in the GA Tech business incubation center. This is housed in a set of buildings that were constructed about 3 years ago.

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Immediately following the GA Tech story was a very different "technology" story. The news reported that a major telephone outage had occurred in a suburban area. A few years ago such an outage would be limited to voice telephone service. Per our high tech advancements - the severed lines also brought down Internet access to a large swath of businesses. They were not able to process credit cards nor transmit faxes. At this point in the story I became mindful of our dependence upon technology.

It is when the reported detailed the source of the outage that I realized that we have an "S.S.D.D." event. It seems that COPPER THIEVES saw an opportunity to score big by ripping some copper lines out of the ground. In the process of cutting the large trunk cables they also sliced a fiber optic cable.

If there is ever a market for recycled glass from fiber optic cables - I believe that the Street Pirates might be able to bring down the entire Internet in this county.


Between the two stories look at the "value add" and the "high order" involved in both of these crimes. One used a powerful computer processor as the vector for the crime. The other used the desire to gain access to a commodity product - copper. It didn't matter that the copper was in a finished form, DEPLOYED as an element in a complex system upon which many thousands of people depended upon to maintain their standard of living. In as much as these copper thieves did not care about this big picture - they ripped this commodity out of the ground.

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Then the street pirates destroy air conditioning units at Black churches within the community they similarly don't care that the metal is used in a complex system for the comfort of the worshipers within the building. They see a box with metal inside and they steal it.

Street Pirates Don't Give A Damn.