First successful criminal case to crack down on software piracy in China
Friday marked a landmark victory against Chinese piracy after a district court sent four men to prison and handed them hefty fines for distributing counterfeit versions of Microsoft’s Windows XP and other computer programs over the internet.
Huqin District People’s Court in Suzhou sentenced Sun Xiansheng and Hong Lei, the founders and main executives of Tomato Garden, a website that generated advertising revenues by offering pirated software for free, to 3½ years in prison and a fine of Rmb1m ($146,000) each. Others involved got smaller fines and jail sentences.
“This is the first successful criminal case to crack down, on such a large scale, on online software piracy in China,” said the Washington-based Business Software Alliance, the industry’s main global lobbying group
Industry executives often regard Beijing’s moves against piracy as little more than show. Counterfeit films, music and software are still readily available in shops, on the street and online.
IPR lawyers said the police’s economic crimes division, which probes piracy cases, gave priority to other crimes such as fraud. They said this meant rights holders had to invest a lot of time and money to provide sufficient evidence to the police to open a case.
While China is making some improvements on it’s piracy problem it still remains a staggering $6.68bn in lost revenues per year according to the BSA.
Last 5 posts by admin
- Cybersitter Software Developer suit accuses China, PC makers of software piracy - February 4th, 2010
- Apple App Store Has Lost $450 Million To Piracy - January 13th, 2010
- Dell buys software license management company - November 25th, 2009
- Software copy protection methods of old - September 21st, 2009
- Is the SIIA getting desperate in it's bid to beat kid Software Pirates? - September 14th, 2009
Popularity: 30% [?]
Related posts:
