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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."
Those pesky Chinese... Lord knows they INVENTED "piracy"...
Second Post...
The United States Homeland Security should not be involved in arresting people in Saipan.
The fact that it has happened is egregious.
WTF is going on with the Obama Whitehouse?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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."
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.
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?
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.
"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".
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.
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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...
Stop piracy now!
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!
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.
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...