In the murky online trade of pirated software, eBay may be the biggest marketplace, but it's not the only one.

As it moves to more aggressively combat illegal sales of knockoff software, the Software Information and Industry Association (SIIA) plans to begin filing lawsuits against sellers operating on several of the smaller auction sites on the Web, according to Scott Bain, the association's litigation counsel who handles online auctions.

Bain told InternetNews.com that the SIIA expects to issue its first lawsuits against non-eBay auction sellers in the coming weeks. Many eBay competitors have software categories on their sites, such as Overstock Auctions, ePier and eBid. Bain declined to name the sites that SIIA has been talking with, but emphasized that they have generally been cooperative.

"We've had some very positive discussions and interactions with the competitors to eBay," Bain told InternetNews.com. "So far, we haven't filed any suits against those auction listings, but we're ramping up activity in that area."

The SIIA's expansion of its litigation against individual sellers comes as the association is becoming increasingly exasperated with eBay for not doing enough to keep pirated software of its own marketplace. On behalf of its members, which include large software makers such as Oracle, Adobe and Apple, SIIA has filed and won lawsuits against dozens of eBay sellers, but Bain said the group is considering legal action against eBay itself.

"We've been trying to work with eBay and offer many different suggestions," Bain said. "Very few if any of those have been adopted."

In their annual study of the economic impact, the Business Software Alliance and research firm IDC estimated that piracy cost the global software industry $48 billion in 2007.

The SIIA has asked eBay to sell it ad space on the software-listing pages where it would warn about piracy, but Bain said eBay refused. Also denied was the group's request that eBay bar the sale of software through its "Buy It Now" feature.

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"The vast majority of the software sold in the Buy It Now feature is pirated," Bain said. "The ones using the Buy It Now feature are the ones trying to fence their goods as quickly as possible."

eBay, which did not respond to request for comment for this story, maintains a "fraud engine," an automated tool programmed with more than 13,000 rules to patrol the marketplace in search of fake goods.

eBay also gives trademark and copyright owners the chance to report fraudulent merchandise through its Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) program. Bain said that the SIIA uses that feature regularly, and that eBay is generally responsive to its takedown requests, but the merchandise is not removed immediately. Bain said that a large amount of pirated software is sold in the gaps between the issuance of a takedown request and the actual removal of the listing.

While his group's dealings with eBay have been "cordial," Bain said that "over time we've been discouraged by the inaction."

Still, the suits against sellers on eBay rivals will likely come before any litigation is brought against eBay.

"I don't mean it to sound like we're sitting here drafting a case because we're not," he explained.

The issue of eBay's responsibility for the authenticity of the goods on its marketplace recently went through a legal test, when a federal judge ruled that the online auctioneer was not required to police its site for counterfeit goods in a case brought by luxury jewelry maker Tiffany.

"The court is not unsympathetic to Tiffany and other rights owners who have invested enormous resources in developing their brands, only to see them illicitly and efficiently exploited by others on the Internet," U.S. District Court judge Richard Sullivan wrote in his opinion. "Nevertheless, the law is clear: it is the trademark owner's burden to police its mark, and companies like eBay cannot be held liable for trademark infringement based solely on their generalized knowledge that trademark infringement might be occurring on their Web sites."

That verdict followed two similar cases in Europe where the courts both ruled against eBay.

Though Bain said that the Tiffany outcome was not a "positive result," it doesn't necessarily short-circuit any litigation the SIIA might pursue.

For starters, he pointed out it was only one judge's opinion in a bench trial, and that it would likely be appealed to Circuit Court.

Second, Tiffany was going after eBay on trademark infringement, whereas any case that the SIIA might file would be based on copyright law, with the relevant statutes found in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Should the SIIA move ahead with litigation against eBay but fail to convince a judge that it violated the DMCA, Bain said his group's next step would be to appeal to Congress to update the 10-year-old copyright law's Safe Harbor provision to address the role of auction sites in the pirated-software trade.