Those MultiMillion-Dollar Taiwanese Windows Pirates are Women

Link: Technology Review: Microsoft, police trace $900 million global software piracy ring from L.A. to Taiwan.

SEATTLE (AP) – Near-perfect knockoffs of 21 different Microsoft programs began surfacing around the world just over a decade ago.

Soon, PCs in more than a dozen countries were running illegal copies of Windows and Office, turning unwitting consumers into criminals and, Microsoft says, exposing them to increased risk of malicious viruses and spyware.

The case began to turn in 2001 when U.S. Customs officers seized a shipping container in Los Angeles filled with $100 million in fake software, including 31,000 copies of the Windows operating system.

From there, Microsoft pushed the investigation through 22 countries. Local law enforcement officials seized software, equipment and records, and made arrests. A court in Taiwan handed down the last of the major sentences in December.

(((Check out who M$osft had arrested for these zillion-dollar piracy operations: "Lisa Chen" and "Chen Bi-Ching.")))

"Finally, in 2007, the owner and operator of Chungtek and Cinway, Chen Bi-ching, was sentenced in Taiwan to four years in prison, while her two co-defendants received jail terms of three years and one year. And the distribution outfit's owner, Huang Jer-sheng, was sentenced to four years in prison. In China, the Public Security Bureau raided the packing and shipping company, Zhang Sheng Electronics, and Li Jian, the manager, was sentenced to three years in 2004.

Matching the Taiwanese counterfeits to copies found around the world, Microsoft gave law enforcement agencies ammunition for raids and criminal cases in the U.S., the U.K., Italy, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Australia, Paraguay and Poland. Dozens of big distributors, middlemen and retailers were convicted, including 35 people in the U.S.

One was Lisa Chen, who according to a Customs press release arrived at the scene of the 2001 shipping container bust with additional counterfeit software in her vehicle. Chen was prosecuted by the Los Angeles district attorney's office as a major U.S. distributor of the Taiwan fakes and received a nine-year prison term in November 2002. She has since been released, according to her lawyer at the time....