Taiwan Group Responsible For 90% of MSFT Piracy

Stony Stevenson writes "Microsoft claims that a small group led by a recently jailed Taiwanese man was the source of almost all high-quality pirated copies of its software up until his arrest in 2004. The claim suggests that Microsoft practically wiped out commercial piracy of its products with the arrest of Huang Jer-sheng, the owner of Taiwan-based software distributor Maximus Technology. Microsoft announced today that Huang and his associates. who were all recently sentenced to jail time, had been responsible for the 'production and distribution of more than 90 percent of the high-quality counterfeit Microsoft software products either seized by law enforcement or test-purchased around the world.'"

Comments

Re:quantifying the unquantifable!

[treke]

The quote in the summary is more specific. It's the "production and distribution of more than 90 percent of the high-quality counterfeit Microsoft software products either seized by law enforcement or test-purchased around the world."

So they're only talking about the stuff they've confiscated and not claiming it's 90% of everything that exists.

Re:Good show, but hardly enough

[king-manic]

Considering that most of the pirating Chinese world is using Sharpie scribbled CD-R's to install non-Genuine Windows, I don't think it matters terribly much if they've stopped "90%" of the flow of high-quality counterfeits.

It's darned good that they caught the bastards, but wake me up when we stop 90% of the actual piracy in Asia.

This strikes me as a fluff piece for nervous investors. Have you been to china/taiwan/HK/S E asia in general. Some of the fakes are very convincing with packaging and so on. If you go out to a bigger local store you'll see a mix of very good fakes with legit software. They'll even translate it and hack it for use with their own servers. When i was there it was harder to find a legit copy of Warcraft 3 then a pirated one and the pirated ones where packaged decently (if nothing like the real package) and they hooked up the remnants of bnetD Asia. This isn't your geek pirating with black sharpies and spools of random software. This is the real piracy that MS ought to fight.

Re:High quality?

[just fiddling around]

You are making the assumption that the recovery disk contains all that. In fact, most of the recovery content is on your hard disk. Now, if you try to repair your PC after the original HDD fails what happens? You have a nice shiny disc, a legitimate paper "licence" to Windows and no way to install it back.

Surprise!

THAT is what makes "recovery disks" crap, even more than the bloatware and crapware.