Chinese Man Pleads Guilty To $100M Piracy Operation 174
iComp sends word of a Chinese businessman who pleaded guilty to selling pirated software the retail value of which totaled more than $100 million. The software came from over 200 different companies, and was sold to buyers in 61 different countries over a 3-year period. The man was arrested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the island of Saipan in 2011, after undercover agents had been working on the case for 18 months (PDF).
"Li trolled black market Internet forums in search of hacked software, and people with the know-how to crack the passwords needed to run the program. Then he advertised them for sale on his websites. Li transferred the pirated programs to customers by sending compressed files via Gmail, or sent them hyperlinks to download servers, officials said. ... Agents lured Li from China to the U.S. territory of Saipan under the premise of discussing a joint illicit business venture. At an island hotel, Li delivered counterfeit packaging and, prosecutors said, "Twenty gigabytes of proprietary data obtained unlawfully from an American software company." Officials did not identify the company in court documents."
PROBABLY RED HAT IS THE US COMPANY !! (Score:0, Funny)
No doubt !! Its software is SUPER valuable !!
STOP. CALLING. IT. PIRACY! (Score:0, Funny)
It has *nothing* to do with stealing shit on the high seas!
It doesn't even have anything to do with *stealing*! It is *information*! The original *copy* is still in the hands of the fuckers who made it!
All he did, was rip off people, by profiting from the artificial scarcity that was originally there for the makers to *rip off people*, and that is nowadays *only* used for the *distributors* to rip off people and rip off the maker *too*!
So what he did was *exactly* like what the distributors do. Apart from a tiny fixed amount of money that went to the makers for their *service*.
He's just deemed a "criminal", because the organized crime that usually does the crimes, also controls the government. That's the only difference.
Re:A hundred million? (Score:1, Funny)
but this is slashdot - information wants to be FREE*
* unless it's a GPL violation, in which case they flay you alive.