HUGE CHINESE SOFTWARE PIRACY RING TACKLED

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Date: Friday July 27, 2007 02:19:00 pm
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    Huge Chinese piracy ring tackled
    Pirated
    software worth $500m (£250m) has been seized as the FBI shuts down a
    world-spanning piracy outfit.Before the raids the Chinese
    counterfeiting syndicate was thought to have sold and distributed
    software worth more than $2bn.The FBI and China’s Public Security
    Bureau arrested 25 people during the two-week operation against the
    pirates.Despite recent crackdowns, industry figures suggest that 82% of
    the software used in China is counterfeit.

    Piracy probe
    The
    FBI said it had been building up a case against the piracy syndicate
    for years before staging the raids on the software production plants in
    China’s Guangdong province.During the raids, dubbed Operation Summer
    Solstice, the FBI seized more than 290,000 CDs with a claimed market
    value of $500m.The gang was known to be producing pirated versions of
    13 of Microsoft’s most popular programs including Windows Vista, XP and
    Server as well as Office 2003 and 2007.The syndicate sold versions of
    these programs in eight languages including Croatian and Dutch.In a
    statement Microsoft said vital information that helped to track down
    the pirates came from its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) scheme.WGA
    forces users of some versions of Windows to validate their copy of the
    operating system with Microsoft when updating their software.Microsoft
    said information gathered by WGA from more than 1,000 fake copies
    produced by the counterfeiters and sold around the world helped law
    enforcement agencies home in on the pirates. Fake software produced by
    the group was found in 27 countries.”Countries around the world are
    expected to experience a significant decrease in the volume of
    counterfeit software as a direct result of this action,” said Microsoft
    in its statement. 

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