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.