Pack Of Four Jailed For Piracy

General News — By Ricky on August 25, 2009 at 6:30 am

Xinhua news agency reported china’s biggest software piracy in which a quad of people was jailed by a Chinese court for spreading pirated versions of their bootleg “Tomato Garden” version of Microsoft’s Windows XP programme.

Piracy

Hong Lei, who is the creator of the downloadable “Tomato Garden Windows XP” was jailed for 3½ years on Thursday by a court in Suzhou in eastern China. Two others received a term of two years and the last one in the quad was given a sentence on the same terms as that of Hong lei.

Unrestricted access to the popular Microsoft software was allowed to the users by crippling the programmer’s authentication and certification barriers by Mr. Hong by creating the tomato garden version. The tomato website was launched way back in the year 2004. After a few complaints from the Chinese authorities, futile steps were taken in the direction which led to the arrest of Mr. Hong.

This incident has been highly publicized by the Beijing government to show queasy businesses and governments, especially Washington that it is quite serious about the eradication of piracy.

However this move hasn’t been enough to convince many people. Like Howard Berman, the congressman of California who is on a visit to Beijing puts it “China’s efforts to stop intellectual property theft have been weak and ineffective – heavy on hard-bitten talk but frivolous in implementation”.