Here’s something you don’t see everyday: China has thrown some software bootleggers in jail. The makers of “Tomato Garden Windows XP,” a version of XP that couldn’t connect to Microsoft’s authentication servers, are going to the big house for three and a half year. This is sort of a landmark because so far, software bootleggers in China have not really been faced with penalties. What’s perhaps most interesting is that the software’s makers didn’t even sell their product – they made it available on the website tomatolei.com, generating revenue only from advertisements.
Keeping in mind that piracy is so rampant in China that Microsoft offers legal versions of Office there for $29, one has to wonder what made the Chinese decide to come down on these particular pirates. One might think that the offence was super public, but that would be before you know that tomatolei.com barely got any traffic. We’re talking well under 2000 hits a month, which is peanuts. That level of traffic doesn’t translate into all that much money.
Still, despite the rampancy of piracy in China, the Tomato guys probably came on the radar because they were fairly centralized about what they were doing. Microsoft has a practice of finding corporations in China which are using pirated software en masse and selling them super cheap licenses on the spot; Microsoft doesn’t necessarily know where the software came from. And really, it could have come from anywhere. We’re talking thousands upon thousands of little shops, not one big warehouse where everyone goes to get the new version of Windows. So while tomatolei.com wasn’t so big, they were all in one place. And with that in mind, it seems unlikely that China hasn’t turned over a new leaf of policing piracy.
(Info via Reuters)
