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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."
THIS is proper use of the copyright laws.
I wanted to make this point, but more so. The guy sold copyrighted material to 300 people. Let's say $100 a pop, which sounds high for someone to fork over for known pirated material. That's $30,000 which is by my reckoning about 4 months salary for the typical person in the US. But this was actually over a 3 year period.
Piracy is bad, and I don't agree with it, and even more so because my livelihood comes from software development of things that are typical targets of piracy, but the punishment here seems massively out of proportion to the crime. 12 years in prison is in the same ballpark as a murder.
Let's pretend I host a website that allows you to download hundreds of novels and other works. These are all still under copyright in the USA. But I, and my website, are located in a place where all these works are in the public domain (e.g. Australia, and Russia).
If I then (perhaps I'm a masochist) visit the USA, can I be arrested and charged? Probably not actually.
But, if I suddenly allow you to download novels etc. that are not in the public domain in the country I operate in, I suddenly can be charged in the USA? Even though I never visited that country, nor had any dealings there?
Why the fuck do countries have laws that allow them to prosecute people who are did their criminal activity in another jurisdiction?
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Obviously because so many crimes cross international borders. He sold illegal product to US citizens over the internet, and was then dumb enough to make a delivery on US soil. There's no room for outrage here unless you're the kind of edgy guy that thinks anarchy would be cool.
If you made $100M (really that, not RIAA funny-math $100M, mind) then that is $100M that the original owners could have made.
Except when you consider that the prices official sources charge are usually much more. People most likely bought software from him because he was selling it at a cheaper price. Would they have bought it otherwise? Who knows? But why should we assume they would have?
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.
Not really. While i you are correct about pricing a d demand your conclusions aren't. The software vendors chose to forgo more sales in favor of higher prices; probably figuring the margins were better since there would be fewer users to support and the higher price justified the required level of support. That's their choice and does not mean someone else has the right to pirate and sell at a lower price point. The buyers were simply not target customers despite their desire to have the software.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Stop calling it piracy, damn it. Did he sail the high seas then rape and pillage? No, he sold cracked software. It's called "commercial copyright infringement," but that doesn't sound so sexy, does it?
Every time you call it piracy, you let the corporatists win.
100 million for 12 years in prison... Might be worth it...
she should have stayed in china and avoided jail.