Brothers caged for selling pirated Adobe software

An American software internet piracy ring destroyed, and for once eBay is absent from the story. Two middle-aged brothers have been sent to prison for selling "massive amounts" of pirated software from Adobe, Autodesk and Macromedia, at huge discounts. They sold software over the internet with a retail value of $5.6m for about …

[Morely Dotes]

So, were they spamming to sell the stuff?

I can't imagine them reaching enough suckers any other way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unreal

I thought everyone got pirated Adobe products from the torrents.

[Fred]

@ AC

Shh.....

they got demonoid man :( that was a sad day.

[Tony Humphreys]

Without condoning their actions in any way

... how were they funding terrorism, prostitution and drugs.

Isn't that what all pirates do, or so we are told!

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm

"...AmericanSoftwareSales.com, CDsalesUSA.com and AmericanSoftwareSales.com."

Interesting how the seem to have run two versions of the same website, there. Still, what a bunch of plonkers. They got greedy. And yeah, if you want to avoid paying, there are easier and cheaper ways of getting the stuff than paying a forger...

[Julian Taylor]

Did they sell any copies of Vista?

In which case they should have been hung, drawn and quartered for making poor, innocent warezers buy that revolting piece of bat guano.

[Anonymous Coward]

In this day and age

Isn't it just incredible in this day and age we live in, that copying cd's is actually considered a 'crime'

When you take into consideration the growing and uncontrollable amounts of: murder, rape, assaults, stabbings, muggings, organised drug crime, organised gun crime, bank robbers, etc

Piracy doesnt even register one micron on the scale of 'crime' compared to the violence and drugs out there.

Also why do the police keep interfering in civil matters?

Civil Law = lawyers, injunctions and monetary fines but no jail

Criminal Law = monetary fines, community service and jail

What a joke. The police will do ANYTHING nowadays to escape confronting a real villain.

[Anonymous Coward]

crime

"Alton Lee Grooms, 56, who helped set up some of the illegal businesses and made $150,000, was rewarded for singing like a canary to the feds, with a sentence of a year and a day."

bad reward... here in the UK if you do 30 odd burglaries then you get caught and you confess to them all, you get rewarded with a thanks and a verbal warning not to do it again!

- Pissed Off Burglary Victim

[Anonymous Coward]

@POBV

Not quite correct. If the toerag smashes your front door and runs off with your bits then yes quite rightly he is let off with a warning for being a honest criminal, but should the same person be sat in a car outside your house using your open wifi from a laptop then, rest assured, the British Government will make sure that a life sentence will be passed. Once all the nasty IT criminals are locked up we can rest assured that the ID system will be secure.

Criminal v Civil: I presume the States have gone the same way as the UK and the government have listened to the paymasters and made these IT related Civil crimes into actual criminal offences so that the police have to get involved.

It was a bit galling for companies such as the BSA having to knock at the door and being refused entry by those aware of their limitations. Now they can just report it to the police who have to act.

[Joel]

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[Dennis]

Re: In this day and age

"Also why do the police keep interfering in civil matters?"

See Section 107 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 titled Criminal liability for making or dealing with infringing articles, &c

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_19880048_en_1.htm

It becomes a criminal offence if the copyright infringement is in the "course of a business". In essence, it's a civil offence for users and a criminal offence for dealers.

[Maligned Truth]

What, no murders to report this week?

Oops. I forgot there was expensive, commercial, proprietary software out there!

A real waste of our taxes, used in seeking out those who are crafty and wizened at garnering riches from fools, and then punishing them. Don't the police have real crimes to fight?

Like, only one murder in one thousand even results in a conviction, with a high number of the convicted being later proven innocent!

I run some of the livecdlist.com free 300 distros. The faster we all switch to safe, secure, FREE OSes, the more taax money we all save.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe?

Maybe they just used google ads?