Chinese police busted $500m illegal software
Chinese police have busted up two criminal organizations and seized pirated software worth half a billion dollars, the culmination of two years of work with the FBI, officials from both countries said yesterday. The gangs pirated Microsoft Corp.Symantec Corp. software and sold it around the world, including in the United States, said Gao Feng, of China’s Ministry of Public Security. Gao said police arrested 25 people and seized property worth about $8 million. Chinese police also confiscated counterfeit software with an estimated retail value of $500 million, according to an FBI statement.
Gao said police discovered in 2005 that the Chinese gangs were colluding with suspects in the United States and notified the FBI’s Beijing office. China has long been the world’s leading source of illegally copied goods, including designer clothes, movies, and music. The country has been under pressure to crack down. The Business Software Alliance, a trade group, said software counterfeiting in China has dropped in recent years. But the group says global piracy took a $40 billion bite out of worldwide software revenue in 2006. According to the FBI, Chinese police arrested 11 people in Shanghai. In Shenzhen, a boomtown just over the border from Hong Kong, 14 people were arrested for making fake Microsoft programs. Even the scene groups already realized what these Chinese pirates overlooked: warez is made for fun, not for profit!
Source: ABC, Boston globe
Comments(27)
That has got to be my favourite picture all day!
LOL!!
“warez is made for fun, not for profit!”
And ironically enough, most games these days are made for profit, and not for fun.
ya retail value of half a billion, but they dont sell it at retail value so its probaly worth no where near that. this what you call spin, the crack down on pirating is the same as drug probition its the same as the war on terror (im not going political here). im just saying that they are fighting a loosing battle, it cant be stopped. when there is a will there is a way.
i dont agree with selling illegal software though.
oh yea admins btw i keep getting:
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 1323123512
Varnish
u know…if people can be as smart as to be crack microsoft program, so what?
actually u need to acknowledge them that they’re just regular people who don’t even make as much as 1/10 of the salary of the programmer in Microsoft Company.
why don’t just “auction” this people for giant software company to hire them? it’s easy, u just need to give them green card + salary to boost up ur own profit return.
If software companies were to lower the price of their software, and not rip people off so much, they probably wouldn’t get so much piracy on their hands… actually, wait… that wouldn’t stop it for shit, mr p got it right, the only way to stop it would be for the companies to stop charging for it, open source ftw
I keep getting
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 1323123512
Varnish
as well btw
I love how they say took a $40 Billion bite out of software revenue, Seriously any software I get to “trial” most I would never pay for, so I would go without. If I couldn’t get windows for free I most likely would use Linux (which i’m sure would be better in the long run anyway). My point is the $40 billion is based on if all the people that bought or downloaded pirated software actually bought the real software, which is a load of crap.
aww, what a sad picture =( :d
China is so 1337…
Is all of that going into a landfill or is it being burnt ?
Think of the environmental consequences….so who doing more harm …the pirates of the government ?
Bill gates should have bought it all off them (at a bulk discount rate). That way.
A) Th pirates get very rich and retire.
b) Billgates can sell it on to us at a profit without having to incur any of the production costs !
“Yu want ceedee, deeveedee?”, “ello, mister?!”, “I ken get yu theap ceedee, deeveedee! yu like?”… I really dont get that scene. You know, its the same as all those 14-years-old knowing ’someone’ who can get em cheap rips. They go to the local library or vidhire and copy it. Whats up with that? Its for people being so ignorant not to bother the effort of getting it themselves. D O W N L O A D I N G… its ideal. ftp, p2p, usenet, torrents, its all possible. Yes, you might need to put a little effort into it to figure it out at first, but it beats burned copies foh sho.
The funniest thing is they think they are going to stop it or put a dent.. the slack will just be taken up by other pirates. They will never win this battle..
If they realised this – they would reduce the cost of software, but nope.. they still want to be greedy and get so much money from us.
yes keep that stuff off the streets, never buy warez you dont know what you could be funding
ps. keep getting that error also
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
didnt know other systems had the amiga guru meditation
all this software could have been used to rehabilitate paris hilton and lindsay fuck lohan. I love lohans cunt so much, fucking junkie whore
COOL……….
There are a LOT of people in my country[INDIA] who make more than $1000 a day.So please anyone come and kick there buts…..
i also keep getting
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 1323123512
Varnish
seeing as rlslog.net is my home page this get very annoying when i open my web browser
Anyone else think that it’s funny that the guy’s name is Gao Feng-talking about piracy, and Sao Feng is in Pirates 3?
Eh, eh?
it just struck me funny.
China all of a sudden is cracking down on piracy and pollution. Is this just to put on a show to the world beacause they have the Olympics coming to china. I think so. After its over they will go back to their same shit.
argg..this is my job too.I download movies,games,software and make 300-500 copy’s to sold it at my retail store!Make a lots of money everyday;)
games cant be open source, u work like a slave on a game and then??
what they need to do is lower a bit the price tag for around 20 euros a game thats a good price, and include some extras like t-shirts posters or whatever
Fonejacker UK…
“You wanna buy dvd”
you guys no what i mean lol…….
Here in the Philippines, they show weekly raids on the news but the pirates just keep coming back TO THE SAME PLACES and everybody knows that.
That landfill scene is very common here and they crush the dvds using a rolling pin…what a waste of resources
I like Lynx’s point – $40Bill may be the retail value but who the F*** pays those prices anyway. A lot of that crap is SOOO expensive that people only buy it as rip-off coz it’s cheap; if it was full price they wouldn’t buy it at all.
If the big boys cut their prices the customer would probably go for the gen article rather than a dodgy rip – given a much smaller price penalty for the gen one.
The Mercedes cars are too expensive for me. Oh well, I’ll just steal one of those and blame the high prices. Woo-Hoo!
“and sold it around the world,”
If proven, that was their downfall.. I am all for sharing, not selling… Now, a donation to the ’site’ is not out of line tho.
Teh_F00_LuLZ you are an idiot, if you can’t afford a Merc then buy a used car or walk. There are plenty of freeware software out there its just the ignorance and egos of the major software companies that thinks they are invincible against pirates and cry and winge when they loose money because people buy or download there products, then they make up ridiculous statistics about billions of dollars they are loosing. THEY ARE LOOSING NOTHING BECAUSE PEOPLE THAT DOWNLOAD THEM CAN’T AFFORD IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Sorry I drifted off.
The best place to buy illegal cd’s/dvd’s is “Latgaliite”
~_~ … that’s just like river compare to an ocean . The truth is far more worst than that. Illegal software isnt a big problem . The problem is that they make illegal “product” that look like original and third world country doesnt have the capapility or the technology to counterfeit it. Yet the news is all over the place about illegal product and the goverment seem like they caught smaller fish than big one who already “bribe” the goverment or something ~_~ .
500 mils maybe big for poor ppl like me but that doesnt make it big like those ppl selling “fake product” on Ebay o_O .