I’ve written before about product piracy and the sellers who ply the trade on eBay. But I hadn’t searched eBay for evidence until now.

There’s a lot of it.

I found PLC programming software from Mitsubishi Electric. A GE Fanuc PLC training console. Autodesk’s AutoCAD software. SAP’s R/3 software. A regular Wal-Mart of products you aren’t supposed to see on eBay.

I can’t say whether any of them are counterfeit, mind you. The products could be legit, even if the means of sale aren’t. But it’s clear that the issue of unauthorized selling isn’t going away.

The Software and Information Industry Association has been wading through this swamp of profiteering for a while now, and this week it filed lawsuits against eight alleged sellers of counterfeit Adobe software, all of whom are purported to have used eBay as the platform for illegal transactions.

“SIIA will continue to combat auction site piracy by monitoring and suing sellers of illegal software without warning,” said Scott Bain, SIIA’s legal council, “regardless of where or how the seller acquired the illegal copies.”

There’s a certain Wild West flavor to Bain’s statement, an unchecked gusto for picking off the bad guy as he reaches for his computer mouse.

Just wait until they get to the peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, where every second, thousands of copies of pilfered software zip across the digital tendrils that span the world. Now that’s the Wild West.

—Chris Chiappinelli, Editor, ManagingAutomation.com