Software pirate jailed for 12 years in US

Chinese national Xiang Li has been jailed for 12 years in the US for selling more than $100m-worth of pirated software.

36-year-old Li was arrested in June 2011 and pleaded guilty to the offenses in January, when he admitted to selling more than 2,000 different types of industrial-grade software packages from websites including crack99.com, cad100.net and dongle-crack-download.com between 2008 and 2011.

The cracked software included applications used for aerospace simulation and design, defense, explosive simulation, intelligence gathering, mining, space exploration and manufacturing plant design, amongst others.

The packages were developed by around 200 US corporations - from small companies to major groups such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Agilent, Ansys and Rockwell Automation - and typically sell for between a few hundred and a million dollars.

Li made them available for as little as $20 to $1,200, transferring them directly to his customers via email. He also sold 20 gigabytes of confidential and proprietary data obtained from the internal computer network of at least one 'cleared defense contractor', according to a US Department of Justice (DoJ) statement.

The DoJ says that Li was part of a much-larger cybercrime organisation based in China. Its investigation found that Chinese and Russian software crackers typically organise into loose 'fan groups' that disable the access and administration controls for software and then post them on online portals such as web forums.

Li was classed as a middle-man, i.e. someone who operates websites advertising the sale of the cracked software and guides customers through the often-complex installation process. His compatriot Chun Yan Li is also wanted for questioning in relation to the illegal trade but remains at large.

"Without middle men like Xiang Li, complex, industrial-grade software that has been cracked is often inoperable and non-transferable," said the DoJ.

News of the sentencing comes shortly after the US Intellectual Property Commission issued a report indicating that IP theft cost the country around $300bn a year, with organisations in China blamed for 50 to 80 per cent of the total.