Category Archives: Blogs

PressRelease February 16, 2016

I was recently interviewed by Ken Suzan for the IPFridays podcast. This was great fun. I got to talk about my career and how I got involved in trademark counterfeiting. I highly recommend subscribing to IPFridays. It’s a timely resource for people involved with intellectual property. Please check out the website: www.IPFridays.com.

Last night’s book signing and discussion at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City was one of the high points of my writing career. Many of the best mystery writers in the field have had book signings here. I read a passage from “The Counterfeit Detective,” and also gave a prepared speech and discussion on trademark counterfeiting as a “victimless crime.”

I attended a wonderful book discussion for my novel “The Counterfeit Detective” at the Salmagundi Mystery Book Club on December 30th.

Salmagundi Book Club Flyer

flyer (1)

I will be delivering a discussion and book reading at the Mysterious Bookshop on Friday, January 8th, from 6:30 to 8:30. You can order the novel at Amazon or in the link below. The Mysterious Bookshop, located at 58 Warren Street, is the oldest ongoing mystery bookshop in the United States. I look forward to seeing everyone.

Friday, January 8th, 6:30pm
Paul R. Paradise, The Counterfeit Detective (http://www.mysteriousbookshop.com/collections/pre-order-upcoming-titles/products/pre-order-paul-r-paradise-the-counterfeit-detective?mc_cid=dd9df295d6&mc_eid=[UNIQID])

Many people first heard about the dark web following the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark website The Silk Road in 2015. Ulbricht received a thirty-year prison sentence as the master mind of a drug operation that used bit coins to purchase drugs on the Internet. Ulbricht’s empire topped $1 billion a year and used the free software known as Tor to mask his identity and drug transactions. Tor is an acronym for a software project named The Onion Router, developed by the United States Research Laboratory and a research team of computer scientists with the goal of preventing Internet monitoring of sensitive government communications.

Tor is only one of several software programs that allow users to operate anonymously outside the World Wide Web in the dark web, an area of cyberspace not indexed by search engines like Google. Freenet is a popular P2P platform that allows for anonymous file sharing in the dark web. Freenet was developed by Ian Clarke as part of a student project when he was a student at the University of Edinburgh in 1999.

The dark web has become a rallying cry for cyberlibertarians and free speech on the Internet advocates.  However, the anonymity afforded in the dark web has become a starting point for file sharing and music piracy, but also for criminal enterprises like the Silk Road. However, government and corporations are also beginning to take advantage of the privacy of the dark web. In time, the dark web will become as mainstream as the world wide web.

DeCSS refers to a computer program capable of decrypting or bypassing the anti-copying system used on commercial DVDs.  The digital versatile disc, also referred to as a digital video disc, was invented in 1995 and offered higher storage capacity than the compact disc (CD). To prevent copying, a content scrambling system was developed in 1996 that was widely used until it was broken in 1999 through the development and distribution of a free ware program called DeCSS. This was the same year that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed into law by President Clinton, made disabling of a digital rights management system illegal.

DeCSS was a collaborative effort. Although three people are believed to have been involved, only one person, a 15-year-old Norwegian teenager named John Lech Johansen, was ever identified. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the DVD Copy Control Association (CCA), filed a complaint against Johansen who was taken to court in Norway for computer hacking in 2002.  He faced two years in court. The Electronic Frontier Foundation assisted in his defense.

Johansen pleased not guilty and claimed he had helped create DeCSS so he would be able to view DVDs on his Linux computer. Only by disabling the copy protection on a DVD could he view the contents. He claimed to have used DeCSS on a DVD he owned only once.

There were public protests in support of Johansen during the trial and he became a poster boy for hackers worldwide who believed that making software like DeCSS is an act of intellectual freedom rather than theft. Johansen was acquitted and then re-tried before again being acquitted. Over the years, programmers around the world have created and distributed hundreds of programs equivalent to DeCSS as freeware—which has resulted in a loss of revenue that the motion picture industry estimated at $20 billion a year.

As a result of the trial Johansen quit high school in his first year and eventually became a self-trained software engineer. He was featured in a documentary film Info Wars.

I was astounded when I first heard about counterfeit eggs, which are sold throughout China and have been a problem since the mid-’90s. The egg white is made from a mixture of resin, starch, coagulant and pigments, while the egg yolk is made from resin and pigments. Counterfeit eggs are unusual in that they do not involve a trademark.

The best way to tell if an egg is fake is by the shape of the shell, which is uniformly too perfect and often larger than a real shell. The shell is made from paraffin wax, gypsum powder and calcium carbonate. Another way to tell its fake is by cracking it open. The fakes make a hollower sound and the egg white and yolk quickly turn into a mixture.

There are many good videos on fake eggs on YouTube.

However, Josh Tetrick founder of Hampton Creek Foods has come up with an edible, safe product called Beyond Eggs. Now Tetrick’s Beyond Eggs doesn’t involve counterfeiting because he isn’t trying to palm off the product as real eggs. Beyond Eggs are egg substitutes and are made from plant protein.

Tetrick, who is thirty-five, developed the idea for Hampton Creek with a friend in 2011. After securing funding, Hampton Creek was launched and is based in San Francisco. Tetrick wants to change the global food industry that he feels is a mess. He also wants to encourage people to eat healthy. Hampton Creek has a staff that includes two engineers, six biochemists, and 11 food scientists.

In my last blog post, I poked fun at having my ebook pirated. Actually, there’s nothing funny about the pirating of anyone’s intellectual property, including my own. I suppose the party responsible believes they’re helping to fight counterfeiting by posting a valuable resource online for everybody.

Ebook piracy requires the circumventing of the digital rights management (DRM) systems used for copy protection. A DRM system is what prevents users of Amazon’s popular Kindle from engaging in eBook piracy. A user who purchases an eBook from Amazon for his Kindle cannot make a copy of the eBook without tampering with the DRM and also cannot sell the content. Apple, makers of the popular iBookstore, uses its FairPlay DRM. Adobe, best known for its open source Portable Document File or PDF, which is a free or open source download, has developed a DRM called Digital Editions Protection Technology or ADEPT. ADEPT is used by Barnes & Noble, Sony and other companies.

 Tampering or bypassing a DRM system is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1998. Book piracy is a growing problem for publishers and authors. In 2012, Library.nu, also called Gigapedia and ebooksclub.org, was shut down by court order for book piracy following legal action from seventeen publishers. The site is believed to have hosted 400,000 ebooks with a revenue that exceeded $10 million.

I performed a search on YouTube and typed in “trademark counterfeiting.”

I was hoping to find something of interest for a future blog. GUESS WHAT I FOUND?

Yes, folks, my own book available for download. Mama Mia!

I’m going to contact my publisher about filing a DMCA Takedown Notice and possibly filing a suit for piracy. The download was posted in YouTube on July 1, 2015.  Hmmm.  Maybe I haven’t been hit too badly.

Please, please, please . . . if you’re reading this blog post, please don’t rip me off by downloading my book. (It’s available on Amazon.com.)

Counterfeiting is a serious crime. Take it from me, I know all about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBu2mNOODZY