At risk offshore

CIO - On a typically steamy New Delhi day in late August 2002, Nenette Day walked into the Ashoka, one of the city's best hotels, for a meeting with Shekhar Verma. Verma had been fired from his job at Geometric Software Solutions Ltd. (GSSL), an outsourcer in Bombay. He allegedly claimed to have the source code for SolidWorks Corp.'s 3-D computer-aided design package, which GSSL was debugging. Verma had contacted a number of SolidWorks' competitors and offered to sell them the source code. Day, an American, had taken the bait and flown to New Delhi. After confirming that what Verma possessed was indeed SolidWorks' source code, Day began negotiating on price, eventually bargaining him down to $200,000 for the code. The deal was struck, and Day got up and left the room. Then agents from India's Central Bureau of Intelligence (CBI) swept in and arrested Verma. Day wasn't arrested -- she's actually a special agent from the FBI's Boston Cybercrime Unit and had gone undercover to work with the CBI on this case, the first undercover operation for the FBI in India.

The arrest led to the first prosecutorial filing for outsourcing-related intellectual property theft in India, in a case that may come to trial before year's end. Given that software outsourcing was a multibillion-dollar business in India last year, the trial will likely draw close scrutiny from both sides of the world. Sound like an open-and-shut case? Day herself isn't nearly so confident. "With no case precedents, the reality is we have no idea how this plays out under their law," she says. Day also says that Verma made two small mistakes (she declines to specify them), without which he could have already gotten off scot-free, and that after a full week in India working with the prosecutors this fall, Day still doesn't understand the applicability of at least one of the critical charges.

Intellectual property, if stolen, "is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle," says Day. Currently, she says, "there is really no law to protect American companies' intellectual property."

U.S. companies need to think seriously about what that means. Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that by 2010, the U.S. IT industry will save $390 billion through offshore outsourcing of software development. But that trend also opens up new channels of industrial espionage in bitterly poor nations that often don't have laws protecting foreign companies and rarely enforce whatever laws may exist. India, obviously eager to protect its national income earned through outsourcing, is scrambling