Taiwan Group Responsible For 90% of MSFT Piracy

Stony Stevenson writes "Microsoft claims that a small group led by a recently jailed Taiwanese man was the source of almost all high-quality pirated copies of its software up until his arrest in 2004. The claim suggests that Microsoft practically wiped out commercial piracy of its products with the arrest of Huang Jer-sheng, the owner of Taiwan-based software distributor Maximus Technology. Microsoft announced today that Huang and his associates. who were all recently sentenced to jail time, had been responsible for the 'production and distribution of more than 90 percent of the high-quality counterfeit Microsoft software products either seized by law enforcement or test-purchased around the world.'"

The jail times.

[deft]

In case you wondered as I did... the penalty for being 90% of the pirating...

"Huang was recently sentenced to four years in jail by a Taiwanese court. Three co-defendants received between 18 months and three years in jail. Six individuals were originally arrested in the case."

I wonder how rich they are off it.

Re:quantifying the unquantifable!

[treke]

The quote in the summary is more specific. It's the "production and distribution of more than 90 percent of the high-quality counterfeit Microsoft software products either seized by law enforcement or test-purchased around the world."

So they're only talking about the stuff they've confiscated and not claiming it's 90% of everything that exists.

Re:Good show, but hardly enough

[king-manic]

Considering that most of the pirating Chinese world is using Sharpie scribbled CD-R's to install non-Genuine Windows, I don't think it matters terribly much if they've stopped "90%" of the flow of high-quality counterfeits.

It's darned good that they caught the bastards, but wake me up when we stop 90% of the actual piracy in Asia.

This strikes me as a fluff piece for nervous investors.

Have you been to china/taiwan/HK/S E asia in general. Some of the fakes are very convincing with packaging and so on. If you go out to a bigger local store you'll see a mix of very good fakes with legit software. They'll even translate it and hack it for use with their own servers. When i was there it was harder to find a legit copy of Warcraft 3 then a pirated one and the pirated ones where packaged decently (if nothing like the real package) and they hooked up the remnants of bnetD Asia. This isn't your geek pirating with black sharpies and spools of random software. This is the real piracy that MS ought to fight.

Re:Good for alternative OSs?

[thona]

::It's likely these copies are sold very cheaply to people who can't afford to buy from a real vendor

No, they were not. We talk of high quality - the vendor bought from a distributor, who got it somewhere cheaper than from MS.

SOMEONE up the chain made a hugh profit.

This is the whole crux here - we dont talk about software someone who wants a pirated copy buys. We talk of softwarte that I could buy and sell a customer. Either cheaper (a LITTLE), or for the full price, and not me nor the customer would have to realize it is fake.

Until Genuine Advantage blows one day in a check.

This is criminal as it gets. Counterfeiting goods, including documentation, certificates and all that.

This is not the "ok, i bought a pirated copy" stuff.

Re:high quality?

[Drinking Bleach]

I can still buy hardware without being tied to any software, I don't know where you shop...

While it may seem grim with the lack of software choices at stores, are you aware there's plenty of quality operating systems available for free (legally)? Operating systems such as Ubuntu, OpenBSD, Solaris, just to name a few.

Re:High quality?

[just fiddling around]

You are making the assumption that the recovery disk contains all that. In fact, most of the recovery content is on your hard disk. Now, if you try to repair your PC after the original HDD fails what happens? You have a nice shiny disc, a legitimate paper "licence" to Windows and no way to install it back.

Surprise!

THAT is what makes "recovery disks" crap, even more than the bloatware and crapware.

Re:High quality?

[RedHelix]

You're getting recovery discs confused with recovery partitions. A recovery disc from any of the major OEMs always has the OS or OS installation script on it as of like 4 years ago. Granted, you didn't always get a recovery disc with a new machine until OEMs had you start burning your own, but the discs can always get you back up and running from scratch. When I worked in Geek Squad hell, I never had a problem reinstalling the OS on a machine after the hard drive failed unless the person didn't have recovery media, which was usually their own fault. And even then, all they had to do was order a new set from the manufacturer.

Re:High quality?

[Froqen]

You need to check out the the Windows RE (http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/default.aspx) that comes with vista. It's almost eactly what you are looking for, a winpe based (dvd bootable) repair environment.