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Piracy Businesses The Courts

Three Execs Get Prison Time For Pirating Oracle Firmware & Solaris OS Update (bleepingcomputer.com) 119

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Three of four TERiX executives were sentenced to prison yesterday for a scheme through which they created three fake companies to pirate Oracle firmware patches and Solaris OS updates. By doing this, the execs avoided paying a per-server fee for every Oracle product their company serviced, instead paying for one patch/update alone.

Court documents show that Oracle was aware of the scheme and eventually connected the dots between the fake companies and TERiX when one of the execs downloaded files from Oracle's servers via one of the fake company's accounts from a TERiX IP address. Oracle filed a complaint with the FBI, but also a civil suit. A judge awarded Oracle damages last year totaling $57.423 million. The judge also barred TERiX from servicing Oracle products.
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Three Execs Get Prison Time For Pirating Oracle Firmware & Solaris OS Update More

Three Execs Get Prison Time For Pirating Oracle Firmware & Solaris OS Update

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  • Jailtime, another great reason to avoid oracle (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Seriously, now I need to go get an insurance policy to pay out if Oracle sticks me with criminal charges? Sounds like this should have been purely a civil matter.

    • Probably would have been a civil matter if they were stealing the patches for themselves, Once you start reselling you have well and truly crossed the line into criminal matters.

  • I'd like to be a fly on the wall in cell block D (Score:5, Funny)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @05:55PM (#56395397)
    TERiX CEO: So, what are you in for?

    Cellmate: I stabbed my mother to death, then fed her remains to a pack of coyotes that live in my neighborhood. And you?

    TERiX CEO: I gave away firmware and OS software patches without paying the necessary service royalties to Oracle.

  • Should have just defrauded pensioners (Score:3)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @05:58PM (#56395415)

    Fake billing old people is a much safer crime.

  • I mean, they profited off of it. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by karmaceutical ( 4951055 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @05:59PM (#56395427)
    I think there is a difference between profiting off of distributing pirated software, as this was the case, and normal piracy (especially media piracy). I'm not upset with this outcome.
    • Mod up if you're a fucking mouth-breather.

  • Never steal from the Mafia (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you steal from the Oracle you get hurt.

  • What the *Bleep*? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @06:10PM (#56395473)
    This gets prison time? The entire US Economy was crashed in 2008 by people lying about the value of derivatives and _this_ is what we send people to jail for?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nobody cares if you hurt the poors. What are they gonna do, get *angry*? Oh no, poor people are mad, woe is me. Hell, we've even graduated to killing them in broad daylight and nobody does shit. Neat country, this.
    • As long as you can afford to pay for an expensive enough group of lawyers to make it happen... What is really sad about this is that they could have used some of these $57.423 million to fund an open source project/startup to develop a replacement, but now I guess Larry will be buying another yacht.

    • Re:What the *Bleep*? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @06:59PM (#56395677)

      The problem is what people did to fuck up the economy in 2008 wasn't illegal. He who has the gold makes the rules.

      • Re:What the *Bleep*? (Score:5, Informative)

        by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @07:13PM (#56395729)
        RE:"The problem is what people did to fuck up the economy in 2008 wasn't illegal. He who has the gold makes the rules."

        bill clinton paved the way by repealing the Glass_Steagall act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] bill clinton basically allowed wallstreet investment banks to use people's private money to gamble with, the Glass Steagall act should be restored
        • Clinton? Don't you mean the Republican congress?

          • Do I need to pull out the youtube video were he waxes philosophical about how we don't need it anymore, or what?

            Oh fuck, here it is anyway. But go right on blaming the repub congress for this.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        • who ran as a Democrat. He moved the Democratic party hard right so he could forge an alliance of economically right wing social librals and so he could get that sweet sweet Wallstreet money. The worst thing is that when he moved the Dems to the right the Rs had to follow suit in order to maintain their identity. That's how we got crazy shit like the Tea Partiers (well that and a ton of money from the Koch Bros.)
      • you can't lie about investments. There was tons of shady crap going on to hide the fact that those derivatives were made up of worthless loans to people who were bound to default. Most of the really bad loans were to house flippers and the like who had no incentive to keep the properties since they didn't live in them.

    • Corporations are people. Money is free speech. And they are free to contribute to municipal, state and federal elections. I can only wonder how many direct attorneys received generous contributions from companies like Oracle.

    • Oracle is one of those companies that will make me smile when they die. In fact I will help stab. Et tu phantom? Oh hell yes. I won't twist the knife.

  • Yet one more reason why I won't do business with Oracle. These updates and firmware use to be free, now they're throwing people in prison because they got free updates that fixed Oracle's shitty products. Screw HPE too... Dell still offers free unencumbered firmware updates.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by haruchai ( 17472 )

      Yet one more reason why I won't do business with Oracle. These updates and firmware use to be free, now they're throwing people in prison because they got free updates that fixed Oracle's shitty products. Screw HPE too... Dell still offers free unencumbered firmware updates.

      Cisco pulls the same shit; no active maintenance contract on the hardware or software means no updates / fixes for you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      I keep thinking that eventually security patching will be a legal requirement, but I can't quite decide whether it will go so far as to require vendors to make security patches available for free.

      I'm sure companies would howl and try to block such a requirement, but there may be counter-arguments that say you can't compel people to install patches that they can't afford, either, so any requirement to be patched probably would coincide with some level of free security patch access.

      It's obvious that fees for

  • If you cannot afford (Score:3)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @06:43PM (#56395611) Homepage
    If you cannot afford to pay for Oracle firmware, say to them "I have n customers on Oracle, how about I get these patches for free or I will go to SQLServer, DB/2, postfix, mariadb etc...". And just work the deal

  • Amazingly bad publicity? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hmm..

    When I was eight-year-old, we lived in a large hut made of uncooked brick, seven siblings of us plus our father, our mother, an aunt and three cousins.
    One week-end our dad set up a rogue Windows Update server to proxy our updates on the LAN, WSUS something, but without paying for the Windows Server 2003 or 2008 license. The next couple of weeks allowed us actual Windows XP security while saving a lot of Internet bandwith among our computers. It was great. We celebrated with a tournament of 4-player MS

    • Your littlr story is cute, but has nothing to do with the crime comitted.

      The company in question took Sun/Oracle updates that require customers to pay Sun/Oracle for and SOLD them to hundreds of clients as if they were selling legal copies bought from Sun/oracle.

      Kinda like walking into a record store and buying records pressed while-you-wait from bootlegs.

      I can't wait to hear what Oracle does to all the company's clients without support contracts.

      • Your littlr story is cute, but has nothing to do with the crime comitted.

        The company in question took Sun/Oracle updates that require customers to pay Sun/Oracle for and SOLD them to hundreds of clients as if they were selling legal copies bought from Sun/oracle.

        Kinda like walking into a record store and buying records pressed while-you-wait from bootlegs.

        I can't wait to hear what Oracle does to all the company's clients without support contracts.

        Quite easy. Send their lawyers over with scary threatening letters of injunctions to shutdown all the illegal Oracle Servers ... unless of course they sign a contract with no discount of course plus a legal fee surcharge for having to pay the lawyers to threaten you.

  • Oracle is more evil than MS (Score:3)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @10:34PM (#56396295) Journal

    I have been saying this for a few years now ever since the Java lawsuit against Google that no one is a bigger threat to innovation, FOSS, and software development freedom than Oracle.

    Their products suck, buggy, ultra expensive, and require contracts which are leased rather than rented with SAAS with all sorts of stipulations.

    MS on the other hand is moving in the other direction but still have a ways to go. Windows being free for non commercial use is one example and unlike Oracle their products are at least improving. Oracle is going the other way around and throwing people in jail who want a bug fix.

    The most outdated shit requiring insecure IE and ancient versions of Windows on desktops is all because of fucking Oracle because they charge an arm and a leg to upgrade so Java6 (last employer) is still being used with customer financial data all because Oracle wants to charge too much money to upgrade that the cost accountants won't pay. .... end rant

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ... for skimping out on paying a little upfront for an independent IT consultant and some scripting jobs on a Linux/Postgres setup.

    Bottom line: Steer clear of Oracle. There is nothing Oracle can do that countless Foss stops can't do better and way cheaper.

    • The Oracle DB running on (now) Oracle hardware, is the fastest DB on the planet, by orders of 1 or 2 magnitudes over any F/OSS DB.
      Only other old behemoths like DB2 or sybase come close to it.

      I guess you are only comparing mini DBs running on a PC.

  • Look - you just can't do this kind of crap without greasing the palms of the necessary politicians.

  • This is a good case of why not to use Oracle, use MySQL or Postgres

    • If you want to stay away from Oracle MySQL is a bad choice. They own it.

      MariaDB on the other hand...

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