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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."
He should have done the transactions in bitcoin.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
If you read TFA, you would have realized that most of the sales were to counties that have US trade embargoes imposed.
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.
He sold to US buyers establishing jurisdiction. If he did not sell to US buyers and to only -- as an example --- Chinese buyers, US courts would likely not have jurisdiction ....
.... Although in this "new post-Megaupload Wikileaks kill people with drones NSA monitors all" world maybe the US government has no limits any longer as the US courts no longer are willing to rule that such limits exist.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really have trouble understanding your mindset and others like you that believe it is A-OK for someone to illegally acquire commercial software (or movies or music or books) and sell it. These "resellers" are not taking expensive software and giving it away in the spirit of communal sharing, they are taking that software and selling it to make a profit for themselves. They made no contributions to the development of the software, they have no stake in the company that hires staff and takes financial risk to produce said software. These people are parasites. It is disheartening that you believe it is worthwhile to defend them.
I defend them when the accusers claim that their retail value is $200,000 dollars a copy and the penalty for copying some CDs is 12 years. Rapists and murderers rarely get 12 years. If you can't see that the motivation behind this is pure greed - as opposed to actual justice - then I pity you.
I really have trouble understanding your mindset and others like you that believe it is A-OK for someone to illegally acquire commercial software (or movies or music or books) and sell it. These "resellers" are not taking expensive software and giving it away in the spirit of communal sharing, they are taking that software and selling it to make a profit for themselves. They made no contributions to the development of the software, they have no stake in the company that hires staff and takes financial risk to produce said software. These people are parasites. It is disheartening that you believe it is worthwhile to defend them.
I defend them when the accusers claim that their retail value is $200,000 dollars a copy and the penalty for copying some CDs is 12 years. Rapists and murderers rarely get 12 years. If you can't see that the motivation behind this is pure greed - as opposed to actual justice - then I pity you.
That price tag has less to do with any real belief that a CD is worth 200 grand a copy and a lot more to do with the unshakable American belief in the effectiveness of the brand of 'come down on them like a ton-o-bricks' justice that has filled your jails with hoards of people doing rediculously long mandatory minimum sentences for things that are misdemeanours in most other countries.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
They can damn well try! I'm behind seven proxi###&4%f2a664#NO CARRIER
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.