Slashdot Mirror
Man Who Sold $100 Million Worth of Pirated Software Gets 12 Years In Prison
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Bloomberg:
"A Chinese national was sentenced to 12 years in a U.S. prison for selling more than $100 million worth of software pirated from American companies, including Agilent Technologies Inc., from his home in China. Li and his wife, of Chengdu, China, were accused of running a website called 'Crack 99' that sold copies of software for which 'access-control mechanisms had been circumvented, the U.S. said in an unsealed 46-count indictment. The pair was charged with distributing more than 500 copyrighted works to more than 300 buyers in the U.S. and overseas from April 2008 to June 2011. The retail value of the products was more than $100 million, the government said. Li is the first Chinese citizen to be 'apprehended and prosecuted in the U.S. for cybercrimes he engaged in entirely from China,' prosecutors said in court filings."
500 copyrighted works to more than 300 buyers in the U.S. and overseas
The retail value of the products was more than $100 million, the government said.
In other words... on average ~$200,000 per product, and ~$333 thousand per buyer
This makes sense, when you are talking about companies like Agilent that sell overpriced products, that retail for probably approximately $500,000
That's why the "pirated $100 million in software" is neither impressive, nor indicating a particularly outrageous pirate.
The outrage, should be the pricing of Enterprise software, not the" inflated retail price " as some sort of metric of the pirate's activity.
Obviously, the buyers weren't willing to pay the price the maker wanted to sell the software at. Therefore, those sales by definition were not worth the retail price.
In simple economic terms... the high price places their product out of demand.
By definition, they're worth what the buyer was willing to pay the pirate for the procureent.
If you're selling a $500,000 software product; going after pirates is not a winning business strategy -- it's figuring out, why the heck you can't pitch your product to legal buyers, and make your desired revenue there. Either the pricing is all wrong, or your marketing or product targetting is all wrong.
He went to Saipan where he tried to sell software and data to US agents pretending to be business men. Isn't Saipan US territory? Perhaps you should try RTFA before sounding of like a dickhead.
Don't travel to U.S territories if you're wanted for U.S crimes.
If you are trading with chinese citizens on chinese soil then then yes you are bound by chinese laws for those dealings, actually in most circumstances you are bound by the laws of both countries. It is one of the reasons many of the big multinationals need so many friggen lawyers as every countries laws are slightly different and they are regularly bound by multiple countries laws when trading and selling goods.
Depends where the servers were located, if they were in China, then the only one to blame are the US citizens that bought the goods.
It's the same if you go to a foreign country and buy drugs not allowed in your country. The seller there can't be persecuted.
Your argument makes good logical sense. Unfortunately, it is not the approach courts have taken to deciding questions of this kind. The courts have instead asked where the was customer when he made the purchase, and used this as the basis of deciding what laws apply to the sale. The original reason for this was to make things easier for consumers, who shouldn't be expected to have to know the laws of the countries of sellers they deal with (particularly as they may not even have any way of knowing where the seller is), but it has been extended since then into areas where this justification makes no sense.
Not entirely correct. Your description matches one of two tests, but is narrower.
from Wiki
A non-uniformed government agent can indeed entrap someone. Asking if you'll sell them pot isn't entrapment. Haranguing them until the finally agree to sell you pot is.
This happened in Thailand not to long ago. Some dude (from the UK I believe) made fun of the king of thailand on his blog, went on vacation to Thailand months later and was arrested for it.
I think with all the drone strikes in the world you would realize the US has jurisdiction where ever it fucking feels like.
The US has less legal constants outside the US than inside it. The US can imprison, torture, or kill without legal comeback in most of the world, but can't even detain people without trail in the US. That's the reason Gitmo is in Cuba not Texas.
"The US... can't even detain people without trail in the US."
NDAA-2013, signed into law the first of this year, says otherwise.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/03/ndaa-obama-indefinite-detention_n_2402601.html
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
He was arrested in June 2011 by U.S. agents when they lured him to a meeting in Saipan where he believed he was delivering 20 gigabytes of data to the representatives of U.S. businessmen. Saipan, an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and like the Atlantic island of Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the U.S., giving American authorities jurisdiction.
No Navy Seals or government conspiracies, just an old fashioned luring operation.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik