ELPSA Anti-Piracy Unit captures father and daughter pirating team, heavy penalties imposed |
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Chalk up another one for the efforts against piracy. It seems that the Anti-Piracy Unit of the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association has busted another pirating outfit, but this time, the outfit came in the form of a father-daughter team that sold illegal copies of games for a mere fraction of the original retail price.
The end result? The father gets to spend four years in jail, the daughter hasa lot of unpaid work hours to fulfill, and both have to pay a very hefty fine. Piracy is serious business indeed.
How did the sting go down, you ask? Well, it came out rather well. Codenamed "Operation Buzzard", the sting was set after the culprit's shop was found to be selling illegal copies of today's popular games - and under a very obvious and very large advertisement banner.
Situated at Coed Mawr market in Flintshire, UK, the shop sold £5 (US$ 10) for each copy. After the capture of both father and daughter, the goods were also seized along with the equipment used to make the copies.
And it seems that the 46-year-old counterfieter had other crimes, one of them being claiming nearly £69,000 (US$ 138,601) worth of Income Support. Normally, this wouldn't be a huge deal - but with the culprit often flying first class to Thailand, it warranted an increase of £190,000 (that's US$ 381,655) in fines. And if he doesn't pay it within six months, it's another three years added to his jail time. Ouch.
While we certainly could wince at just how stiff the penalties are, we definitely applaud ELPSA taking this matter very seriously. Updates as we get them, and you can check out more about the Anti-Piracy Unit's victory against all things pirate-y at the via link.
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Comments [refresh]
I hate to, but really, people who sell copies of games and people who digitally share games are completely different. These people deserve to be busted, true, but they're not really pirates. Counterfeiters, perhaps. But not true-and-true pirates.
Bootleggers, to be precise. This is piracy in it's worst form. Not only theft, but profitting at the expense of the developers. They had it coming. And not all folks who download isos are pirates, either. In a purely technical sense, yes, I suppose. But many, such as myself, download isos for one of two reasons: 1) I want to know if the product I'm planning on spendin $50 is worth my hard-earned cash (or will even run properly on my system), and there's no demo available to find out, or 2) in the case of my PSP, even if I KNOW I'm going to love a game and pay for it (IE: God of War), I still want the ISO instead of the UMD. It's quieter, UMDs are a pain in the ass to carry around, and with new games (again, such as GOW) running at the newly unlocked 333Mhz I want all the battery life I can get, and a spinning UMD cuts that down significantly, and it's just easier to download an ISO than rip it myself. I download lots of stuff, but don't consider myself a pirate at all. Well, perhaps with movies, as I watch them months before the DVD is available. But even then nobody loses out, as I've either already seen the film in the theater if I ever had any intention of doing so anyway, or will buy the DVD when it's released because it looks nicer in my collection and has extra features.
They totally deserved that. Downloading is one thing, but selling them is really mean.
I just download it, check the gameplay for couple hours, stop, go to gamestop and buy the game, get rid of the pirate copy.
If it suck then I not buying it and I just throw it away.