Is software licensing theft still a problem? Is the Pope a Catholic? Or perhaps more aptly, is the Pope a pirate? The answers are yes, yes and probably not. That said, when security software vendor AVAST decided to track down exactly where one 14 user enterprise software license had ended up after it was discovered on a file-sharing site, it must have been somewhat surprised to find that it cropped up a couple of times in Vatican City.

The original 14 seat Avast! Pro antivirus license was for a small enterprise in Arizona, US and was purchased back in June 2009. Somehow this ended up being distributed by file-sharing and WaReZ sites, and then some. In a matter of just 18 months the license ended up being actively used by no less than 774,651 users instead of the intended 14.

While I have never understood why the software itself has that exclamation mark, that number of pirate users surely deserves one: that’s 774,651 users on a 14 user license!

When AVAST tracked the usage of the license, it found that it had been used in more than 200 countries.

AVAST Software CEO Vince Steckler warns of the paradox of searching for ‘free’ antivirus on WaReZ which have something of a reputation for distributing malware amongst the stolen software. The Avast virus lab has documented cases of cracked antivirus software itself being infected with malware, which should come as no great surprise.

Certainly not as surprising as finding that two of the pirates using the stolen Avast! software resided in Vatican City, home of the Pope. The distribution of the pirated license was quite stunning in reach, especially when you analyse the spread: Russia (which headed the ‘most copies’ used list) only accounted for 9 percent of the total. Mexico and Brazil followed closely behind, with Italy, Spain, USA, India, Philippines, France and Ukraine making up the rest of the top ten.

“We are in the process of converting these pirates over to legal products” Steckler insists, with users being sent a pop-up notice warning them that they have a pirated copy of the software running and giving them the option to convert to the free product or pay for a proper ‘Pro’ version license.

Two things struck me as totally unbelievable about this case, quite apart from the scale of piracy for a single license, namely: why would anyone entrust their computer security to a ‘cracked’ product and why bother searching for, downloading and installing a cracked version of the Pro product when a free version is also available completely legally and which employs the same antivirus engine as the Pro version?