Beijing, China – Four people have been jailed for up to three and a half years for selling pirate copies of Windows XP.
A court in Suzhou city in eastern China sentenced Hong Lei and Sun Xianzhong to three and a half years and fined them a million Yuan ($176,000). Two other people were jailed for two years and fined 100,000 Yuan.
State prosecutors said that the gang had offered free downloads of the operating system, making money from advertising and that more than ten million people had downloaded the software.
The company that ran the Tomato Garden site, Chengdu Gongruan Networking Technology, was fined 8.77 million yuan ($1.5 million) and ordered to hand over 2.92 million yuan ($510,000) of income.
The pirates were arrested after the US Business Software Alliance filed a complaint with the Chinese authorities about the site last June. Also last year, 11 people were sentenced to up to six and a half years in prison in Shenzhen for selling more than two billion dollars’ worth of fake Microsoft products.