Prosecutors Thursday announced the indictment of a global ring of suspected
software thieves and five workers at chip maker Intel Corp. who allegedly
exchanged hardware for access to an array of pirated software.
A federal grand jury in Chicago indicted 17 people, including a former
Microsoft Corp. employee and two Europeans, for allegedly infringing the
copyright on more than 5,000 computer software programs. Of those indicted,
12 were allegedly members of the group known as “Pirates with Attitudes”
(PWA), a software piracy ring that was infiltrated by government
investigators last year.
Their Web site, identified by prosecutors as “Sentinel” or ”WAREZ”, was
located on a computer at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec and
accumulated software that was stripped of its embedded copy protection by
members. Programs available for downloading to those provided access via a
secure Internet protocol address included operating systems, applications
such as word processing and data analysis, games and MP3 music files,
prosecutors said.
Four employees of Santa Clara, California-based Intel shipped hardware to
the site in Canada in 1998 to give it more storage capacity. In exchange,
they and other Intel employees were to be given access to the pirated
software, which a fifth employee allegedly arranged.
The company was unaware of the scheme, prosecutors said. Another defendant
was an employee of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. who allegedly
supplied bootleg copies of the software giant’s products for the site. He
also allegedly gave access to Microsoft’s internal network to the ringleader
of PWA.
Last year, the Justice Department said it was launching an initiative to
combat piracy and counterfeiting of itellectual property. ”it is the most
significant investigation of copyright infringement involving the use of the
Internet conducted to date by the FBI,”aid Kathleen McChesney, head of the
FBI’s Chicago office.
If convicted, the defendants could spend five years in prison and pay a
$250,000 fine, or they could be ordered to pay a fine totaling twice the
gross gain to any defendant or twice the gross loss to any victim, whichever
is greater.(r)
