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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."
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
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 !
I hazard a guess that the cost of this operation was less than the amount of tax that the US company paid that year.
"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".
Saipan isn't a foreign country, it's a US territory in the same category as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
'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.
Not to derail, since I completely agree, but it's worth pointing out that typical "free-sharing piracy" is not "sharing what you have."
Although you might think you have a tangible copy of a song or movie sitting on your hard drive, what you really have (assuming you obtained it legally) is a license to use that song according to 1) the EULA, if there is one, and 2) the copyright law of your respective country. What you don't have is a license or freedom to upload and share the file with the rest of the world. That right remains with the copyright holder.
The sword cuts both ways. We should restrict the piss out of copyright inflation and reverse it significantly, but seriously, if we've been arguing that "copyright is not property," and therefore "infringement is not theft," let's actually stick to that argument rather than pretend all of the sudden that copyrighted works are now suddenly chattel and therefore shareable.
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
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 $200-1000. And they actually pay MORE taxes in China than in America. INSANE.
BUT, I look at the likes of Bill Gates and Balmer, who have invested into companies that basically steal IP from America and are now hard at work shipping it out. For example, Bill gates wants to develop his nuke idea in China rather than in America. But, China has ZERO intention of protecting his IP. In fact, they will use it for their own purposes and like Germany's transrapid, buy one and then steal all of the tech.
Seriously, the west needs to quit providing companies like this with help, when they constantly screw over the nation. HP, Dell, IBM, GE, etc should be allowed to take up the theft with China, rather than having us solve their issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is Saipan in a foreign country? I thought it was part of a US territory.
Personally, I'd outlaw governmental lying. Claiming to be a 14 year old girl to invite men to your sting? Say "I'm not a cop" when asked what you do when meeting a suspect undercover? Invite a foreign national to a US territory to arrest them for what isn't even a crime ( If I'm in Mexico and kill an American, I broke Mexican law, not US law, so deciding they are undesirable people, then inviting them to the US to arrest them for breaking US law when they never set foot there before is insane). If anything, the people that approved his visa should all be fired and arrested. They knowingly issued a visa on false grounds. I haven't seen any exception in US immigration law for covert op visas issued on false pretenses.
Learn to love Alaska
Unless he was forced to take the Meth, then it was his own choice to take it. So he destroyed his own life.
I don't see why drugs are singled out to be prohibited, when there are so many other vices that destroy lives. Alcohol, tobacco, gambling, legal drugs,...... Either ban all of them or let Darwin take care of the addicts.
This guy is not pirating DVDs that sell at 10$ 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