$500M Piracy Ring Busted In China

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @11:59PM from the but-did-you-arrest-the-red-army dept.

Blahbooboo3 writes "Reported by several news organizations, pirated software worth more than $500 million has been seized by authorities in China as part of a joint operation run by Chinese police and the FBI. Microsoft estimates that the software piracy of an international counterfeiting syndicate, over the past six years, cost the company at least $2 billion in lost software revenue. Microsoft said that key information in the investigation came from its Windows Genuine Advantage program, an anti-piracy system that can check whether an OS is legit. It's generally accepted that Microsoft has done well out of software piracy: it helps products become widely used, and as the market matures, people start to pay for their software. And this has been a major factor in Windows beating Linux in China, as Bill Gates has admitted."

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How convenient by this213 · 2007-07-25 00:41 · Score: 0, Redundant

All this just after Microsoft decides to come down to pirate copy prices in China
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/07/10/microsof t_china/index.html

Now that they have no competition, they can mark the price back up a thousandfold where it belongs.

Cover their "losses"? How do you lose something you never had to begin with?