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Chinese Man Gets 30 Months For Fake Cisco Sales
alphadogg writes "A Chinese man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a US prison this week for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco Systems gear. Yongcai Li, 33, will also have to pay the networking company nearly $800,000 in restitution after being the conduit for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer hardware, the FBI said Friday. Prosecutors said he procured the fake gear in China and then sent it to co-conspirators in the US. His alleged co-conspirators have not been charged. Li was arrested by FBI agents on Jan. 9, 2009, in Las Vegas — while the annual Consumer Electronics Show was taking place there. Two years ago, the FBI claimed to have seized more than $78 million worth of counterfeit equipment in more than 400 seizures."
2.5 years is not 30 years, it’s 30 months.
[insert witty comment here]
And why not? These guys should be getting just as much time as the other dude.
Good thing he didn't download a music album instead. He might of ended up with 3 times that fee.
China has apparently decided to get stricter about dealing with counterfeits. This may signal that China is more willing to cooperate with other countries and large corporations. However, as China produces more and more of its own goods, it has a direct economic incentive to cooperate with counterfeiting issues since that will encourage reciprocal behavior in other countries. Moreover, according to TFA, the FBI and the US government in general have been trying in particular to deal with counterfeit Cisco products. So this still took lots of pressure and activity. And Cisco does a lot of business in China, so that's yet another reason China might crack down in a case like this. This thus isn't similar to a situation like that with Google that fits in with China's broader policies on censorship and how it runs its political system. It shouldn't be surprising that China will occasionally cooperate when it has a direct economic incentive and doesn't risk tainting its people with democracy or free speech.
The question is, what counts as counterfeit hardware? Is he taking, say "genuine" Cisco hardware (as in, made in the same factory just not with the Cisco name on it) and selling it as real Cisco hardware, is he taking inferior components to make his hardware, is the hardware functional?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This may explain some issues my employer's having with their "Cisco" equipment... lol Knowing them they bought it on the cheap and got screwed.
Real Cisco --- 30 years turn into 30 months.
Fake Cisco --- 30 months turn into 30 years.
"You're telling me that Crisco makes delicious pie crusts AND hi-end networking equipment? Sold!"
The counterfeit gear drives down the price of used gear significantly, counterfeit or not.
Since the counterfeit gear is typically made by the same factories that make the real stuff, quality isn't a big problem. Some of the lower quality Cisco counterfeits that I encouter are obvious, but still functional (like the guys that were selling obvious fake PA-GEs that still worked fine for $500 ea from San Francisco)
is that this stuff is so massively overpriced that there will certainly always be a counterfeit market
i can understand a premium for the latest 10gbe switch with 800 ports and 6 cabinets connected with virtual etherfuck technology, but for the smaller stuff, accelerating the total commodization of the low end would be better served by consistent manufacturers in china working with quality open source linux and bsd implementations and open fpga designs. or by the counterfeiters.
Just think how much time he'd have gotten if they were *real* Ciscos!
Farm out production to cheap labor in a country that has little regard for IP. Cisco wins
Get FBI and US justice department to enforce and foot the bill for counterfeiting under the guise of "National security". Cisco wins
In both cases, Cisco wins and in all cases the US citizens lose. We foot the bill, lose the jobs, get Chinese made equipment in our government and pay with tax dollars to support Ciscos business decision.
I haven't worked with Cisco support all that much, just a few times with some access routers, WIC cards and miscellaneous software BS. But I'm pretty sure they always wanted my serial number or SmartNet info, and to get the latter you have to supply a serial number.
Why wouldn't Cisco just reject these products because the serial numbers are wrong/bogus/nonexistent? It seems unlikely the counterfeits would have legitimate serial numbers, or if they cloned a range, ones that couldn't be flagged.
And since when does Cisco give *anything* away for free? You can often claw a latest IOS or ASA firmware image out of them if you open a warranty case within 90 days, but after that you are PAYING FOR SUPPORT BABY, as much as they can wring out of you.
.. I've not heard of anybody counterfeiting them yet.
So let me get this straight - it's Ebay that is to blame for nations internet structure, Not Al Gore and certainly not the sysadmin that just installed a shiny bargain basement Dink switch at the NAP?
And yet China continues to be a preferred trade partner to the "free" world. What the hell does this even mean anymore? They poison our children with first lead, then cadmium laced jewellery, they hack our networks an infest them with malware/spyware, force labor upon their own children, yet they are our "friends" because we can buy their crap for cheap and sell it at Walmart.
Isn't it time to reevaluate our trade partner status with this country that is set on deceiving us with every opportunity they get?
About 13 years ago, the government of China contacted Cisco through its Hong Kong office and said "China has been very good to Cisco. Now it is time for Cisco to be very good to China." They forced Cisco to open factories in China, and China started a company later known as Huawei, run by some army generals. The Internet was becoming a major communications component of their country, both private and government, and they did not like the idea that their infrastructure would be made in America. Once Cisco opened their Chinese factories, someone in China began almost immediately cloning Cisco hardware. I wonder who? The clones were so close that they even had the same bugs.
Cisco seemed to put up with this for a while, since almost all of the hardware was kept within China. Then, sometime in the last ten years, I can't remember when, Huawei started selling Cisco-like hardware worldwide. At that point, Cisco sued and forced them to stop all international sales of the disputed products. Later, Huawei rewrote its router code and even licensed code from another American company.
So, what to do with all that surplus manufacturing capacity?
Well, whether you are against patent and copyright law or not, China is doing it's best to erode the spirit and application of these laws. For most intents and purposes, those laws do not work and barely exist there. Ideas circulate freely, DRM-free, patent-law-free, and copyright-free. Not legally - but in practice they do. Just as at Pirate Bay. If you ask me, the strongest political force to modify patent and copyright laws is piracy, not open-source. The reason is, there is strength in numbers. Many more people use pirate-sourced products than commercial or open-source. Therefore, the Pirate Party, and http://www.stealthisfilm.com/.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
What it's time to do is re-evaluate your values.
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The big thing that makes it counterfeit is that it says it is made by Cisco and isn't. That right there is what really causes the problem. There's nothing saying you can't make a device like a Cisco device and sell it. In fact, you'll find many companies do. HP's ProCurve switches were made to function a lot like Cisco switches (at least last time I used them, which was some time ago). For that matter you can make cards to plug in to Cisco's gear under your own label. All this is perfectly fine. However, when you start claiming that such gear is made by Cisco, well then you are counterfeiting.
In some cases it also might be a copyright infringement issue. Some Cisco hardware is fairly simplistic/standard on the hardware side. Their older PIX firewalls were like that. They were more or less just specialized PCs. Ok well that means someone could make similar hardware without much trouble, and legally. However the code that actually made it a PIX was owned by Cisco. That's where a counterfeiter might decide to just copy that and use it on their own device, since the development of the code is the hard and expensive part.
As for what problems it has technically? Usually such counterfeit gear is made bottom dollar. The cheapest materials, components and processes are used. As such there can be reliability issues that you don't find with brand name equipment. Also there's the problem of support/replacement. If the item is counterfeit, well the company that it is ripped off from won't deal with it, the counterfeiter won't deal with it, so you are basically can't do anything but buy a new one.
Another potential problem would be backdoors. You don't know who the counterfeiter is associated with, and perhaps they insert backdoors in to their equipment. After all, they clearly have some rather shady morals to being with, such a thing would be far more likely with them than with a legit company. When you get genuine Cisco gear, you are just about as certain as you can be that it is free of hidden backdoors. After all, the stuff is extremely widely used, including by governments for classified uses. If there were backdoors, the chance of them getting found would be high. However when you use counterfeit stuff, well who knows? You know nothing about the company behind it, as they've gone out of their way to hide.
counterfeit is quite popular in China now and that could detory Chinese creativity without question.
If the routers are just as good as the "genuine" except that Cisco didn't get paid for the use of their name, then is not this another case, when the imaginary property (on "trademark") rears its ugly (if imaginary) head?
Yes, the buyers were lead to believe, they are buying the "real" thing, but that's between them and the seller.
But the US government is involved — on behalf of a fat corporation, which means, Cisco ought now to be frowned upon, just as the mafiAA members are.
And yet, kdawson seems to be giving Cisco a much easier time in his write-up, than usual in such cases... The New York Country Lawyer and the "I don't believe in Imaginary Property", who denounce entertainment-owners for trying to enforce their (imaginary) property rights, and fight them on any technicality imaginable, aren't anywhere in sight either... Is this because these people only want freedom to steal for the stuff, they might be interested in themselves?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
does the fake gear work as well as the Cisco gear ? Is it even made in the same factories ?
I'd bet money that 1) this guy is an agent of the Chinese government in some way or another, and 2) a CRC of the microcode for the firmware in these routers would not match the CRC of the microcode in an American-made one.
Think about it. If *I* were China and I wanted built-in industrial espionage capabilities through an undetectable backdoor, this is *exactly* how I'd do it - with trajaned firmware in counterfeit network hardware. You got yer plausible deniability, untraceability, undetectability, and a client list happy to get a discount on expensive hardware and not concerned with where it came from. We know the Chinese are sucking up as much of our intellectual property and technology secrets as they can get their hands on right under our noses while protesting vehemently that they aren't because they know we can't prove it. Even when we find one of the guys involved like this, they just act shocked, claim they had nothing to do with it, cut him loose to serve a few years, and continue right on doing it with some other patsy. What better way could there be than to trojan the microcode in network hardware, then sell it at a loss to greedy western corporations who don't give a damn about security if they can save a couple bucks?
Read that as "Chinese Man Gets 30 Months For Fake CRISCO Sales".
I'm sorry to say, but after the infinite possibilities conjured up by that thought of all those illicit Chinese tubs of CRISCO (what are they doing with it? why do they need so much? why are they pirating it instead of just buying it a the supermarket? what, er, activities or businesses where they using it for?) the real story about ordinary old hardware counterfeiting was a pretty fair letdown . . . .