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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."
If you read TFA, you would have realized that most of the sales were to counties that have US trade embargoes imposed.
He was on US soil, so he can be arrested for actions illegal under US law. This is a fairly common precedent when the law was broken in the US but they have since left. This is newsworthy because the crimes occurred outside the US but he was still considered to have broken US law.
An interesting parallel would be people in the US who allow seditious comments harmful to public order in China (or so they'll say) to be posted on their websites, which are then accessed by Chinese people. Will China now feel a whole lot happier about arresting Americans for this should they go anywhere where China has enough influence, or have their flights diverted? Or, indeed, just accuse Americans of stuff to keep them out or stop them selling stuff there.
So if I sell to Chinese buyers I'm bound by Chinese law? You don't see how that might be a very bad thing?
Can't have it both ways. If Chinese citizens are bound by US law then US citizens must be bound by Chinese law. For China to agree to extradite without tit for tat would make them very stupid.
I like how he got less than someone who *doesn't* sell what they pirate can get. There's a lesson there...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Really? 12 years in prison just for possibly decreasing someone's profits? That's definitely cruel and unusual punishment.Such terms should be reserved for murderers and what-not.