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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.'"
I didn't think there was such a thing as high-quality Microsoft software, pirated or otherwise...
Come on... using "High quality" and "Microsoft products" in the same sentence?
;-)
So they were responsible for 9 out the 10 pirate copies of Microsoft Flight simulator then?
had been responsible for the 'production and distribution of more than 90 percent of the high-quality counterfeit Microsoft software products
Why doesn't MSFT sell these "high-quality" products instead of the crap they've been selling us for years.
90% sounds like a nice marketing department developed figure.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The more interesting story would be, how did they catch him?
Microsoft will lower the price of all its retail products right? Since it's no longer competing with pirated software.
someone's still selling Windows 3.11 for Workgroups...
Does this mean the cost of microsoft software will come down? We are always being told that piracy on this scale makes software companies push up prices. So when is the cost of vista (especially in the uk) coming down?
Acid House saves Souls
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.
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Toro
I don't know which is worse, some years of jail time (and getting off for good behavior), or being charged $222,000 for 24 lousy song files. The Thomas case makes being the #1 world pirate look glamorous by comparison.
Of course, due to the huge drop in piracy that this represents (-90%!), I can only wonder about what a +90% upsurge in global warming is going to do to this planet. Yikes.
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
Every time I read news about "piracy", the "pirates" are "stealing" 90% of the money!
Now I wonder:
A - Is it 90% of the 10% left from the previous "pirate" operation?
So, after three or four captures, it becomes clear they are actually selling legally less than 1/100 of a single copy.
B - Are the "pirates" stealing copies from other "pirates" and repitating them?
So, 10% of the copies would be legally sold and 90% would reach the final clients after being "pirated" about twenty times.
Actually, no, it is not.
I surmise pirates really do offer better quality, as they conveniently remove the WGA and similar "protection measures", thus ensuring the user's copy of Windows will never ever get blocked by Microsoft. For instance.
Though I suspect that "high-quality copy" means "CD and packaging virtually indistinguishable from the original retail copy", not "a better product". Nevertheless, sometimes pirate copies are of quite higher quality than the original.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Let's not fool ourselves. I pirate things all the time, but I've never told myself what I was doing was "good" piracy.
In the cases you give I am deprived of the product which is "pirated". Copying does not deprive the source of the product. You are making a very very strange comparison between copying and theft.
Let me put it this way ... if someone can take my paycheck, and leave me with exactly every cent in that paycheck, then they are welcome to it and I invite everyone to do the same.
not that I've ever encountered pirated software mind you
...must have more 0's and not as many 1's.
How is this insightful? Just asking a question which damns WGA doesn't mean you're worth modding up.
This is 90% of professional piracy, therefore:
1) There are other vendors (see the other 10%), who really probably can expand to fill the spaces - ESPECIALLY since if these guys were apprehended so long ago there is a fine vista market ready for targetting. If you've already managed to circumvent the protection then you're only going to be limited by distribution and manufacture, which is hardly that big a hurdle
2) 90% of HIGH QUALITY piracy, NOT 90% of torrent downloaders and casual pirates. WGA, supposedly, protects against this, which is also a huge problem
Just getting pissy with copy protection is hardly worthy of mod points.
::It's likely these copies are sold very cheaply to people who can't afford to buy from a real vendor
No, they were not. We talk of high quality - the vendor bought from a distributor, who got it somewhere cheaper than from MS.
SOMEONE up the chain made a hugh profit.
This is the whole crux here - we dont talk about software someone who wants a pirated copy buys. We talk of softwarte that I could buy and sell a customer. Either cheaper (a LITTLE), or for the full price, and not me nor the customer would have to realize it is fake.
Until Genuine Advantage blows one day in a check.
This is criminal as it gets. Counterfeiting goods, including documentation, certificates and all that.
This is not the "ok, i bought a pirated copy" stuff.
It won't be long given the pricing structure of Microsoft products that someone will step in to fill the orders for cheap knock offs. High quality or otherwise. I've been in the high tech shopping district in Taiwan and the prices for these pirated items are (usually) far below the price of legitimate copies.
Also been in Mexico City where street vendors sell about any software title on the planet - some slick copies, some shoddy.
And I doubt the 90% figure. Looks and smells like some marketing drone pulled it out of his @ss.
Too lazy to create a sig...
A little off topic, but just pointing out that if you can freely make copies of that money, then that money is in infinite supply and thus worthless. I don't think you would appreciate (hah!) your money being devalued. Also, this is generally referred to as counterfeiting, and quite illegal :^)
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
you have trouble seeing the difference between copied bits and the effort required to arrange those bits. The value of software isn't in the commercial packaging or plastic media, it's obviously in the efforts required to create something people will pay for. While you can argue a fallacy of "duplicating doesn't deprive you of the original copy," you're simply ignorantly wrong.
Copying software doesn't deprive somebody of the version you copied, it deprives the creator/owner of their ability to legitimately sell copies of their work. That's what you are stealing when you copy.
Your same silly argument could be applied to counterfeiting currency: copying real money doesn't deprive anyone of their legitimate currency. The problem is, it devalues money by depriving the government of its ability to regulate the supply and value of money. That's why the Secret Service exists.
90% of the supply for a gigantic market is gone? Seems like a perfect business opportunity :)
Copying software results in: - Legitimate copies going up in price, as companies argue that piracy has taken away profits that should have gone to them. - More and increasingly draconian copy protection that only hurts legitimate users.
Your argument is only valid in for software that was never intended for profit. Yes, copying retail software does do real harm and IS real theft by any rational standard of law. If you prefer to think there are no laws and software is exempt from property protections, than yes, I guess your argument is unbeatable. Not through any inherent validity, but in your self-imposed view that stealing software is somehow "ok" because it doesn't change the bits in question.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, and that's not what you're arguing, but it's how it comes across. Of course, I'm looking at this from the companies perspective. From a consumer's perspective, if you allow someone to copy your software, then your argument is perfectly valid. You're still breaking the law and causing real harm to real people, but I could see your point in this light.
Considering just how adamant Microsoft has been about killing off XP, it makes one wonder if the "high quality" label used here may allow the guy to become a practical scapegoat for Microsoft, should they attempt some underhanded tactic like setting their authentication system to automatically flag all future XP serial numbers it encounters as pirated, regardless of the product's legitimacy. By claiming all currently unsold retail and system builder versions of XP are pirate copies, it wouldn't take much to bury the OS beyond a mass recall of all unsold discs to be used as "evidence".
Of course, this couldn't ever really happen, but it does make you think...
8==8 Bones 8==8
Your argument is aimed at the wrong post here. This is a decent argument when talking about the filesharing type of piracy - people downloading stuff they weren't going to buy anyway. There's no realistic loss from this.
However, the article and comment are both talking about professional piracy - burning discs and printing manuals and shrinkwrapping in boxes that purport to be the real things. When someone honest goes and buys one of those, $60 that was heading to MS is snatched away. The fact the money never got as far as their bank account doesn't make a lot of difference - it would have got there if not for the piracy.
Even the slashdot crowd mostly condemn this sort of piracy.
Of course it's high quality; it just doesn't meet your needs.
Vista is the first Windows infestation to officially, publicly acknowledge what serious MSFT-watchers have known for some time: the population of usees and customers are two entirely separate, non-overlapping groups.
The usees, of course, are the poor sheeple who bought a PC and naively expect Windows to "work" because it's the "market" "leader".
The customers are abviously the MPAA, RIAA and other "content" industry groups (collectively known as the MAFIAA (Media Authoritarian Fanatic Ass-farking of America) to friend and foe alike). Of course, "everyone" knows that all major media content these days is made using Macs or *nix boxen.
Their customers are happy as the proverbial clams with Vista. Especially since they never have to actually touch it!
There was no mention in the article how these pirates handled keys and activation and such.
An exact copy of the pretty box and manuals and holograms and stuff is fine, but if it's an exact copy of the CD contents itself, it won't activate properly. Do they use hacked versions of the binaries? You'd think that would stand out (failed updates and such). Anyone know?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Funnily enough, that's sometimes true.
One of my professors bought a copy of MATLAB to use for solving some filtering equations. (He taught the DSP courses) He installed the program on his laptop, but whenever he wasn't using his internet access, he couldn't use MATLAB correctly. I'm not sure why.
He finally just installed a pirated version and it worked flawlessly.
Technically, he wasn't pirating the software either, since he paid for a full licence. They weren't cheap, either. It runs about $25k for a full version of MATLAB.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.