As many of you have probably read by now, a admitted pirate in the vacinity of Houston, Texas, has been fined $1.1 million dollars from having over 5,100 counterfiet copies of Symantec's Norton products. Li Chen, owner of Microsource International, was also found to have sold over 9.9 million dollars in pirated software. The total restitution came to 1,005,000 million US, with Microsoft recieving $95,000 due to licensing agreements.
This is certainly a reason to rally for software makers who have had it up to the top of their heads with what they call 'huge profit loses' to piracy. Catching someone like Li Chen is indeed a mighty blow. Earlier last year, a Vancouver, Canada company was revoked the right to sell any Symantec products after found out that they had been illegally supplying copies of Norton Antivirus, Norton Security Suite, and Norton Internet Security to businesses in the greater British Columbia and Alberta regions. Also, fined up to $400,000 for illegally selling pirated copies of all manner of Microsoft operating systems, including the defunct Windows 98.
Microsoft counters back that this sort of thing is happening all over the country, and why software piracy has to stop. "This guy was one of the largest distributors of pirated software. He had direct ties to China, where the counterfeit product was being produced," said Cris Paden, a Symantec spokesman.
Microsoft worked with Symantec to support the Houston police and FBI in this case, said Bonnie MacNaughton, a senior attorney at the Redmond, Wash., software giant. "Microsoft is very pleased with the outcome and law enforcement's support for intellectual property protection," she said in a statement provided by Microsoft's public relations agency.
Microsoft itself has activately pursued people that have gained profit from their operating system and products without paying their due to the software giant. In early September, Microsoft brought lawsuits to 8 resellars for selling illegal products.
"The lawsuits were filed in Arizona, California, Illinois, Minnesota and New York against companies that allegedly sold counterfeit copies of software such as Office 2000 Professional and Windows XP, Microsoft said in a statement Monday.
Some of the resellers also allegedly dealt in fake and used Certificate of Authenticity labels, which are used to identify Microsoft products as genuine, the company said. A Certificate of Authenticity includes a product key code and is designed to prevent counterfeiting."
This ties in with the new feature that Microsoft introduced earlier in July to sniff out illegal copies of their OS, using their Windows Update site to pass on the Windows Geniune Validation Tool, which checks the current product key to make sure that it was legally sold at some point, bypassing some of the previous methods of cracking the Product Activation that allowed people to bypass previous measures to stop piracy of Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. The Business Software Alliance, which was formed a few years ago, say that 35% of all software installed on computers is pirated and accoujnts for $33 Billion dollars a year in losses.
Microsoft also provides a phone number for it's Windows Genuine Advantage Program and encourages people to call if they suspect piracy. There is restituion for people that havef been duped into buying illegal software, Microsoft makes a base by base case and is giving out free license copies of their operating systems to people that have lost out this way.
Again ,the war goes on. I am not adverse to fighting piracy when it comes to people like Li Chen that are intentionally burning the system to make profit. I think that more regulation as far as the software sold to retailers should be brought down, and the idea of Product Activation is not a bad idea, trying to weed out these kind of things from happening.