Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Man Pleads Guilty To $100M Piracy Operation
iComp sends word of a Chinese businessman who pleaded guilty to selling pirated software the retail value of which totaled more than $100 million. The software came from over 200 different companies, and was sold to buyers in 61 different countries over a 3-year period. The man was arrested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the island of Saipan in 2011, after undercover agents had been working on the case for 18 months (PDF).
"Li trolled black market Internet forums in search of hacked software, and people with the know-how to crack the passwords needed to run the program. Then he advertised them for sale on his websites. Li transferred the pirated programs to customers by sending compressed files via Gmail, or sent them hyperlinks to download servers, officials said. ... Agents lured Li from China to the U.S. territory of Saipan under the premise of discussing a joint illicit business venture. At an island hotel, Li delivered counterfeit packaging and, prosecutors said, "Twenty gigabytes of proprietary data obtained unlawfully from an American software company." Officials did not identify the company in court documents."
Saipan is the largest island of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), an unincorporated territory of the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saipan
By the way... Saipan is the largest island of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, an unincorporated territory of the United States.
So it is well within the scope of the Homeland Security Thugs...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No doubt !! Its software is SUPER valuable !!
If the dude pocketed a hundred million bucks, then it's a hundred million dollar piracy operation. This sounds to me like the standard law enforcement press release inflation gambit.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Would it surprise you if I said that there are a number of people here who despise the drug war and other such nonsense?
The United States Homeland Security should not be involved in arresting people in Saipan.
Why not?
The fact that it has happened is egregious.
Your ignorance is egregious. And atrocious.
WTF is going on with the Obama Whitehouse?
They're enforcing the law, unlike the Bush Whitehouse?
It will drive prices down, so I'm all for it. Adderall and the like are sold at drug stores, but it's often inconvenient to get a script.
What do those chemical substances have to do with the American STASI arresting people in foreign countries? Would you be comfortable with some police from a middle eastern country arresting you in the US for breaking some law they have over there? Does the word "Homeland" have any meaning for you at all?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
More like a 60,000 USD operation, which is what he made off his dealings. Retail value here has no meaning here as nothing was taken from anyone.
The other day I was chatting with someone from an Islamic country and the guy told me that he **WAS FORCED TO DOWNLOAD PIRATED MOVIES** because of the censorship that was being practiced in his country.
He posted a list of movies that he said he had to pirate because they were ***ILLEGAL*** in his country.
The local cinemas were prohibited from showing those movies, and he couldn't buy any legal version of those movies on legal DVDs either.
Among the names of the movies that he posted, I only remember two of them, and they were:
The Prince of Egypt http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120794/
and
Babe http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112431/
The person claimed that he felt bad for downloading the pirated version of the movies but he had no choice.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Does he solely do that piracy software or there are also other people with him when he did that black internet market? They (U.S. Department homeland security)should be more stern more in dealing this kind of black market.
I hazard a guess that the cost of this operation was less than the amount of tax that the US company paid that year.
Clearly you do not have personal experience knowing someone who's life was destroyed by Meth, which is not Adderall.
Was it oracle and the range-check function?
;>)
.
Slashdot covered this earlier in the year with a judge saying that a high-schooler could write the range-check code from scratch with no difficulty. Yet Oracle was suing for millions for nine lines of code that checks and validates the input matching the expected range of values.
.
If these court cases can hide what exactly the person is charged with doing wrong and illegally, then how can we even know if there is a potential miscarriage of justice?
This guy made less than $100k selling pirated software, so we're not really talking about some kind of big-shot international criminal syndicate. I don't think I would want the U.S. busting small-time drug dealers in random third countries either.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you have had that experience, then you're not impartial to begin with. What is it that you want? Safety?
It has *nothing* to do with stealing shit on the high seas!
It doesn't even have anything to do with *stealing*! It is *information*! The original *copy* is still in the hands of the fuckers who made it!
All he did, was rip off people, by profiting from the artificial scarcity that was originally there for the makers to *rip off people*, and that is nowadays *only* used for the *distributors* to rip off people and rip off the maker *too*!
So what he did was *exactly* like what the distributors do. Apart from a tiny fixed amount of money that went to the makers for their *service*.
He's just deemed a "criminal", because the organized crime that usually does the crimes, also controls the government. That's the only difference.
That is the moral of the story. If you get something for nothing then share it for nothing. Profiting from anothers work may be a crime, but freely sharing what you have with others is not, and is certainly in sync with the most followed world religions.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Why is this modded -1 & not +5 informative? Homeboy walked on to US Federal government land. I'm far more concerned about the enforcement of property laws on Chinese Nationals strutting on to US soil than I object to copyright enforcement & mission creep in this case.
They lured a dumbass to their jurisdiction. It's not like they diverted a plane flight.
"Li trolled black market Internet forums"
Maybe the forum members got disgusted by his posts, and so reported him to the Feds. Seriously, I didn't know till I checked my edictionary that "troll" had the pre-Internet non-mythical meaning of "circulate, move around".
I would not be comfortable with any police force (or military for that matter) from *any* country arresting anyone in *any other* country. I think extradition treaties are there for a reason, but even then extradtion orders are supposedly carried out by the local LEO on behalf of the requesting LEO.
And *even* then, there should be a close oversight on this, to prevent things like the Dotcom scandal. Anything else seems like a slipper slope.. obviously I'm not comfortable as this is already happening (and has been for who knows how long). Slippery slope indeed..
Slashdot. Unreadable news to annoy nerds. - wonkey_monkey
Saipan isn't a foreign country, it's a US territory in the same category as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Why isn't anyone asking the question....why did the department of homeland security arrest this guy in Saipan?
'The man was arrested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the island of Saipan'
So lemme get this straight - the Department of Homeland Security spent taxpayer money finding and arresting a software pirate...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
IS STILL 16.3 TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT rofl
suckers go on go after people that will never get you money back...funny
Since when Homeland Security has started investigating something as trivial as copyright violation, even on a grand scale? Aren't they supposed to deal with terrorism, natural disasters and more serious threats to life and property? Wouldn't this be the competence of the FBI instead? And what jurisdiction do the US have over this man, as the crimes committed in China?
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Do you think it would be possible to get him to plead guilty to ALL of the world's piracy? I mean, If I'm ever looking down the barell of the *AA's guns and expect to be found guilty, then I'm going down Like Spock: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Who wouldn't want to become the modern day version of, Jesus?!
Commercial scale piracy is a criminal offense, well unless the RIAA do it, in which case it's a contract matter (i.e. those off book copies of records they were selling, or the compilation disk where they never notified or paid the copyright holder, stuff like that is civil). Well lets just say it's a criminal offense, if your a person person and not a corporation person.
In this case, the person was Chinese, the software was expensive, retailing at $2000-$3000 a pop. so it made sense to meet at a beach resort, on a holiday island, half way between China and the US. With the Homeland Security agents spending 2 weeks to scope out the location first.
Their tans let them blend in for surveillance purposes. All totally necessary and in no sense an overkill.
"he advertised them for sale on his websites"
So people paid money to buy pirated software?
That's goes against everything piracy stands for.
Seriously, this is INSANE. First off, MS and the other companies go to great lengths to NOT pay their fair share of taxes. And if a nation attempts to have the companies and wealthy from these pay their fair share, they threaten to go elsewhere.
Then to add injury to insult, Gates had MS Windows cost less than $5 to buy in the store in China, while here, they take in $200-1000. And they actually pay MORE taxes in China than in America. INSANE.
BUT, I look at the likes of Bill Gates and Balmer, who have invested into companies that basically steal IP from America and are now hard at work shipping it out. For example, Bill gates wants to develop his nuke idea in China rather than in America. But, China has ZERO intention of protecting his IP. In fact, they will use it for their own purposes and like Germany's transrapid, buy one and then steal all of the tech.
Seriously, the west needs to quit providing companies like this with help, when they constantly screw over the nation. HP, Dell, IBM, GE, etc should be allowed to take up the theft with China, rather than having us solve their issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If I recall correctly, it was Bushy the Younger who signed the papers for the DHS, no?
We, the public, were sold an agency that was supposed to protect us from terists and terism, whatever those are. Somethin' 'bout dang ol' furreners burnin' the flag n shit.
I'm not sure what terism is, but I don't think it has anything to do with the price of pirated software in China.
So, are you okay with this sort of mission creep, as long as it's your black man crush in the White House? It's bizarre, the bad behavior people will overlook on the part of their government, as long as their favorite party's puppet is the one on stage.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Is Saipan in a foreign country? I thought it was part of a US territory.
Personally, I'd outlaw governmental lying. Claiming to be a 14 year old girl to invite men to your sting? Say "I'm not a cop" when asked what you do when meeting a suspect undercover? Invite a foreign national to a US territory to arrest them for what isn't even a crime ( If I'm in Mexico and kill an American, I broke Mexican law, not US law, so deciding they are undesirable people, then inviting them to the US to arrest them for breaking US law when they never set foot there before is insane). If anything, the people that approved his visa should all be fired and arrested. They knowingly issued a visa on false grounds. I haven't seen any exception in US immigration law for covert op visas issued on false pretenses.
Learn to love Alaska
I think you meant to write "Clearly you do not have personal experience knowing someone who chose to destroy their life with Meth, which is not Adderall".
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
A bright, handsome young man joined our Mensa computer group in the early 80s. We were mostly hackers and programmers and we swapped a lot of software. Just curiosity; we'd run a program a few times to see how it worked. We'd disassemble it to figure out how the clever parts were done. And we'd move on to the next batch of software at next months meeting.
The young man seemed to come from nowhere and was instantly very popular. After a while I discovered he was printing labels for his 5" floppy disks and selling the software. He even set up a nice office downtown in our US city for this business. We were close, and he wasn't ashamed to show me his operation. I was stunned at his brash lack of morals.
But he went on to explain that he was from Ireland. The money was not for him, but for the IRA. He was proud to contribute, and it became clear that he was a hard core supporter and a patriot. But all I could think of was that the already dirty money would be going to buy guns & powder and escalate the violence.
He disappeared as mysteriously as he appeared- altogether staying less than 8 months in our city.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Unless he was forced to take the Meth, then it was his own choice to take it. So he destroyed his own life.
I don't see why drugs are singled out to be prohibited, when there are so many other vices that destroy lives. Alcohol, tobacco, gambling, legal drugs,...... Either ban all of them or let Darwin take care of the addicts.
That already awefully sounds like entrapment.
Prosecuting a crime that wouldn't have been committed if it hadn't been encouraged by a LEO is sort of not ok.
20 minutes into the future
Stop piracy now!
It's not entrapment. He committed the crime without being encouraged by LEO. He performed an action in his country that his country declined to prosecute or deport him for. So the US LEO tempted him into their jurisdiction so they could arrest him for a crime committed elsewhere.
Still dodgy as hell, but not entrapment.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
is that there appears to be little or no effort by the Chinese government at stopping piracy of software. Sure, on occasion you here about Chinese authorities making busts but my guess is these are mostly politically motivated. The Chinese are known for acts of piracy and disregard for copyright law.
This guy is not pirating DVDs that sell at 10$ a pop. The software mentioned in the document, Ansoft Designer, Ansoft HFSS, Ansoft SIWave, Ansys Multiphysics etc sell at USD 50K down + 10K a year typically. The R&D content of these products are measured in man-decades. Even the entry level developer positions in such companies require a Masters in a STEM field. Computer aided design tool making companies like Ansys, Ansoft, Fluent, Abacus, *CCM++ are the last few companies that pay decent wages for American ^H^H^H^H STEM grads from American univs. It is not fair to club these companies with RIAA and MPAA and paint them all with a broad brush.
Piracy of these software bleeds these companies and actually hurt earning potentials of nerds in America. These companies are places where it is cool to be a nerd. They treat their employees well because PhDs do not work to the drum beat of a slave driver. You have to convince them to be productive voluntarily.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
if he was HSBC.
We Chinese leaders give a hearty thanks the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for allowing us to transfer this culprit's ill gotten gain into our own accounts. Keep up the good work fellows!
What any government cares most about is itself. And having significant portion of population not being able to work (and pay taxes) due to addiction is, therefore, bad.
Is bad.
Now, you do have to pay bills for a 'free' operation that involves 'piracy' for the greater good of free information, but outright selling copies, that is crossing the line.
As pointed out, Saipan is US territory but it has special visa rules. Basically it's easier for Asian people to get visas to go there and a few other US territories in Asia than the US mainland. Also, those Pacific US territories have sketchy reputations and there have been allegations of slave labor factories operating there, so I'm sure he thought nothing of being asked to go there. I'm sure that those who approved his visa did so under orders from their superiors. I have a lot of personal issues with how the US government operates its visa policy and how sometimes even family members of legal immigrants can't get visas to visit here, but I don't see any crime being done here by approving a visa application - as long as the approver wasn't paid by the applicant to do so. Finally, your assumption that no US law was broken is likely false. I'm sure that he had US customers. Anytime some one gets rich off piracy, Uncle Sam gets really interested in that person.
Less you be too sanctimonious, please understand that many EU countries prosecute supposed "violations" of their laws that don't even take place on their own territory. France threatened to close down Ebay because (gasp) it's legal for people in the US to sell Nazi memorabilia from World War II and they made Ebay provide filters so French people can't see such items. The sellers in question were not even marketing their items to French citizens and in fact probably expected only US buyers to purchase them.
"Say "I'm not a cop" when asked what you do when meeting a suspect undercover?"
The guy we want to catch is the person who is only avoiding illegal stuff when cops are around. I have no problem with cops telling this particular lie.
I do have a problem with cops enabling crimes that the suspect wasn't even capable of doing on his own. Like purchasing missiles only available from the US Army when the suspect has zero contacts.
Clearly you don't really understand the problems. It sucks. Its terrible what happens to people, but, its more than just the chemical itself.
Lots of people have used meth without issue. Its given to military pilots for long missions, still today. Meth can be used safely. The problem comes when you prohibit it, because, there are people who want strong stimulents....and those people are going to get them.
So instead of going to the drug store and getting a pill, at a reasonable price, they go to another addict who is willing/able to deal with more dangerous characters to get larger quantities and distribute it. (I would say for profit but, lets keep it real, his only profit is going right into his arm, or lungs).... so he pays a very high price for a very high potency product that is too expensive to take orally, and not provided in a convinent form.
Its the situation caused by prohibition and other terrible policy that created these situations, driven people away from safer drugs and safer forms of their drugs, and done much of the work of ruining these people's lives.
Frankly, it angers me greatly that these policies are not seen as tantamount to pushing people into ovens.
Eh, if you're going to ban all of them, then you never really know where to stop. After all, coffee has caffeine, and advil's a painkiller.
I say just let people do whatever the hell they want to themselves, so long as they're not hurting others. Darwin will do his job to those that can't keep shit under control, leaving the remainder of people as either having more willpower, or more reasoning or whatever. Get rid of the idiots, and the strong remain. Basically, it's a win-win.
I don't think I would want the U.S. busting small-time drug dealers in random third countries either.
If you get caught with $100,000 worth of cocaine you're going to prison for a LONG time. If you think $100k is "small time" you must work on Wall Street.
Free Martian Whores!
That's how it works, right?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
someone later realized that the teams of enforcement personnel from multiple agencies and multiple jurisdictions, travelling and on the case for 18 months, actually cost *more than $100 million* they were allegedly "saving" but the figure was buried in an accounting report that is being worked on, by several agencies, in several jurisdictions...
Not true.
Signed in Bill Clinton's tenure? It basically says 'any US citizen violating a US law is guilty of breaking that law, regardless of their location at the time of the event. 'It goes on to say that any 'US citizen breaking a law of a [specific] foreign countries is then a felon in the US.'
http://www.uniset.ca/other/cs6/253F3d234.html
In 1998, Thomas Bean, an FFL, was in Laredo participating in a gun show. One evening he crossed the border into Mexico for dinner. A box of ammo was found in his vehicle by Mexican customs officers. At the time importing ammunition into Mexico was considered a felony. Bean was charged and convicted of the felony of unlawfully importing ammunition. As a convicted felon, Bean lost all rights to possess firearms when he returned to the US.
<quote>
( If I'm in Mexico and kill an American, I broke Mexican law, not US law, so deciding they are undesirable people, then inviting them to the US to arrest them for breaking US law when they never set foot there before is insane). </quote>
He was entrapped for the new venture, but not for the others committed previously. And it's the previous ones he is being charged with. He was "lured" with an entrapment scheme designed to trap him, but as he wasn't charged with the new crime, it was not illegal entrapment.
Learn to love Alaska
You desire to turn this into a guns right issue doesn't change the facts. The page you link to is quite clear, he did not serve time in US prisons (as the Chinese man is facing), and was not charged in the US for a crime committed elsewhere (as the Chinese man is facing). He had a foreign felony conviction considered a felony conviction for US firearms purposes. That is a narrow issue completely unrelated to the issue in this case. But OMG, Bill Clinton took our guns, and Obama is doing the same! Guns, guns for all. Screw civil rights, we don't need them if we have our guns. Though, we wouldn't need guns if we had our civil rights, but don't think about it logically, that's too hard.
Learn to love Alaska
Others replying to me indicate he was arrested for the crimes he committed in Saipan, which were solicited by US agents, and thus, entrapment.
Learn to love Alaska
Ok, terrible to reply to a robospam post. I'm just wondering if a post offering "Cheap NFL Jerseys from China" in a story about a Chinese counterfeiting operation is irony or some sort of slightly confused bot that actually read the summary and thought the post might be a relevant product pitch?
Saipan is tecnically a Commonwealth, which is slightly different from a Trust Territory like Guam or Puerto Rico. Foreign nationals do not need a US visa to visit Saipan, just a visa to Saipan from the government of Saipan. Foreign nationals need a US Visa and go through US immigrations to visit Guam. You still have to go through immigration again in Hawaii when you arrive from Guam. People used to travel to Guam and become residents to fast track a US citizenship, but that's more difficult now. A lot of Asians now use Saipan as a stepping stone to US citizenship.
A territory is an insular area protected and adminstered by the United States. They have have non-voting members in congress.
A commonwealth is a self-governing insular area that elects to be part of the United States. They have their own government and are more independent.
Commonwealths, territories, and protectorates are insular areas whose people are citizens of the United States, with the exception of American Samoa. The Samoans are nationals--free to go anywhere in the United States--but they are not citizens.
http://www.exploresaipan.com/Visit_Saipan/Travel.aspx
http://hongkong.usconsulate.gov/niv_guam.html
It appears that your information is incorrect. You need a US visa to go to Saipan, unless one of the exceptions.
Learn to love Alaska