| The 'Robin Hood' software piracy gang is netted |
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The final episode of the 3 year long criminal investigation into a software piracy racket cumulated in the four men involved and who operated under the guise of a gang that prosecutors described as 'Robin Hood' being punished with jail sentences last week.
The four British men stole new and expensive software from large and wealthy organizations and offered it free to people through the internet. This global piracy ring called the ‘DrinkorDie.com’ was one of the biggest piracy rings in the world.
The hearing was held at London's Old Bailey and the judge condemned such dishonest and illicit activities of these men who stole software from big firms and presented it to individuals through the net absolutely free. This practice had made firms like the Microsoft suffer huge losses in its revenue.
Illegal activities of this group can be dated back to 1995 when they released a pirated copy of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system before Microsoft formally launched the software in the market. The group shut down in 2002 following criminal investigations in USA, Britain and other countries. Around 20 people in the USA were arrested in this regard in 2002.
All the four men were punished differently on Friday. Alex Bell, a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter I.T. manager who was aged 29 years was sentenced for 2½ years while Steven Dowd, an unemployed 39-year-old was imprisoned for 2 years. On the other hand, Mark Vent, who was 31 years old and worked as a computer network administrator was to stay behind bars for about 18 months and Andrew Eardley, 35, a computer-systems manager was granted a suspended jail punishment. The last two had pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud.
Prosecutors notified that the four pranksters thought ill of software companies and harboured immense hatred for such firms. Therefore, they gave away free software to customers by unraveling company security codes and made software firms incur losses.
An annoyed prosecutor, Bruce Houlder, commented, "They think of themselves like latter-day Robin Hoods or sea pirates like Johnny Depp in the film Pirates of the Caribbean." He also called the group a gang of ‘plain thieves’.
Posted
on : Wed, 11 May 2005 14:55 GMT | General News
By : Chris Rowe
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