Man Who Sold $100 Million Worth of Pirated Software Gets 12 Years In Prison

An anonymous reader sends this quote from Bloomberg: "A Chinese national was sentenced to 12 years in a U.S. prison for selling more than $100 million worth of software pirated from American companies, including Agilent Technologies Inc., from his home in China. Li and his wife, of Chengdu, China, were accused of running a website called 'Crack 99' that sold copies of software for which 'access-control mechanisms had been circumvented, the U.S. said in an unsealed 46-count indictment. The pair was charged with distributing more than 500 copyrighted works to more than 300 buyers in the U.S. and overseas from April 2008 to June 2011. The retail value of the products was more than $100 million, the government said. Li is the first Chinese citizen to be 'apprehended and prosecuted in the U.S. for cybercrimes he engaged in entirely from China,' prosecutors said in court filings."

Re:Nuber not that impressive

[Pubstar]

If you read TFA, you would have realized that most of the sales were to counties that have US trade embargoes imposed.

Re:Good

[ranulf]

He was on US soil, so he can be arrested for actions illegal under US law. This is a fairly common precedent when the law was broken in the US but they have since left. This is newsworthy because the crimes occurred outside the US but he was still considered to have broken US law.

Re:Good

[xelah]

An interesting parallel would be people in the US who allow seditious comments harmful to public order in China (or so they'll say) to be posted on their websites, which are then accessed by Chinese people. Will China now feel a whole lot happier about arresting Americans for this should they go anywhere where China has enough influence, or have their flights diverted? Or, indeed, just accuse Americans of stuff to keep them out or stop them selling stuff there.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

So if I sell to Chinese buyers I'm bound by Chinese law? You don't see how that might be a very bad thing?

Can't have it both ways. If Chinese citizens are bound by US law then US citizens must be bound by Chinese law. For China to agree to extradite without tit for tat would make them very stupid.

Re:Good

[mrbester]

I like how he got less than someone who *doesn't* sell what they pirate can get. There's a lesson there...

Re:Good

[AK Marc]

Yes, he was entrapped in Saipan, and prosecuted for crimes he didn't commit while in the US. His mistake was not equating Saipan with Washington DC. He might as well have been on the lawn of the White House selling bootlegs. At least it's good to know that entrapment is legal again.

Re:Nuber not that impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

...If you're selling a $500,000 software product; going after pirates is not a winning business strategy -- it's figuring out, why the heck you can't pitch your product to legal buyers, and make your desired revenue there. Either the pricing is all wrong, or your marketing or product targetting is all wrong.

Legal trade embargoes obviously cast aside for a moment, I'd say you truly don't understand how difficult it might be to price certain types of software. A product used in engineering and design that costs $100,000 and $10,000 per person per year to maintain sounds like it might be priced fairly when talking about using it to design our next-generation communication satellites or Mars space rover. That investment in design might make you the preferred vendor generating millions in revenue.

But the instant you start talking about that same $100,000 software package being used to design the perfect rubber dildo or fake vomit, suddenly it's a complete rip-off, and should be priced cheaper? Why, because ironically they ended up designing and selling the #1 sex toy in multiple countries and made twice as much revenue as the guy making satellites and space rovers?

I'm not arguing that some software packages are overpriced. They are. However, it's quite easy to see based on the application of certain software packages it becomes very difficult to pin an appropriate price tag on it.

Re:Good

[loonycyborg]

Really? 12 years in prison just for possibly decreasing someone's profits? That's definitely cruel and unusual punishment.Such terms should be reserved for murderers and what-not.

Re:Good

[1s44c]

Unless I'm thinking of the wrong person China didn't extradite. US agents lied about some huge deal to get the guy to go to a US territory of his own free will. Once there he was arrested.

But generally speaking the US considers US law to be global but everyone else's law to be local to them.

Re:Good

[rahvin112]

There have been several arrested in China. The Chinese tend to limit these arrests to those you speak and write in a Chinese dialect though which is frequently expat's. I believe there is an American expat doing 10 years in hard labor right now for comments he posted while in America.