Chinese pirates get record jail sentences
A gang of 11 people has been convicted of pirating Microsoft products in China, with some receiving jail terms up to six-and-a-half years. That’s the longest such sentence ever handed down in a country with a reputation for being soft of copyright infringement.
According to Microsoft, the pirates sold knock-off software in 36 countries. The software, which covered 19 products, was worth a total of $2 billion (though that may be based on its full retail price rather than the sum the offenders actually raked in). The group owned manufacturing equipment (for creating convincing packaging) worth millions of dollars, and had used bogus licenses to set up deals with disk manufacturers.
Despite the huge scale of the operation, the 11 who were convicted had personally only sold $200,000 worth of software outside of China. While that may mean the overseas sales made up a small proportion of the piracy, it could instead mean those who wound up in court were not the main ringleaders.
It appears the operation was aimed more at scamming customers rather than selling to people who knew they were buying pirated software. ‘Tens of thousands’ of people informed Microsoft that they had bought products which turned out to be fake, and more than a thousand passed on physical copies for analysis by the company.
It’s no secret that Microsoft has previously been unhappy with China’s lax attitude toward software piracy. However, that appears to have changed with the firm’s regional manager Fengming Liu noting:
Thanks to the actions of the Chinese government, we have seen a significant improvement in the environment for intellectual property rights in China. Moving forward, we will continue to work with the relevant authorities in China to ensure that counterfeit software does not undermine the development of China’s knowledge economy.
Silicon Alley Insider speculates the change of attitude could be down to the resignation of Joe Peterson, the man who designed Microsoft’s ‘Windows Genuine Advantage’ scheme, which blacked out the screens of unauthorized Windows machines. That had caused so much outrage among users of pirated copies of Windows that the Chinese government questioned whether it was an appropriate tactic.
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