Two of three plead guilty in huge US CD piracy bust

April 5, 2006

Hypnosis4U2NV used our news submit to tell us "I'm surprised that Cd's are still very popular since DVDs
have gotten just as cheap.."

It seems a few gentlemen living in California had a
fairly impressive CD factory operating, that offered both music and software.
Most of the music Cd's were described as Latin music. However, the three
scofflaws allegedly also offered software such as the famous (and quite
expensive) Adobe Photoshop. The operation was of such a scale that authorities
are claiming it to be the largest of it's kind ever uncovered in the United
States.

Two men involved in what U.S. authorities called the largest bust of pirated music CDs and computer software in America each pleaded guilty to five criminal counts on Monday, law enforcement officials said. The pair, Ye Teng Wen, 30, and Hao He, 30, both of Union City, California, pleaded guilty on five piracy-related charges to manufacturing 200,000 illegal CDs, much of it Latin music, said Kevin Ryan, U.S. Attorney for Northern California.

The two, along with a third man, Yaobin
Zhai, 33, were indicted in October on charges of illegally copying music
CDs, as well as Symantec Corp. computer security software and Adobe
Systems Photoshop. This is "the largest case involving CD manufacturing
piracy uncovered in the United States to date," Ryan told a news
conference. "The theft associated with this kind of piracy, copyright
infringement, is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, I believe, on a
yearly basis."

In the article, it was mentioned that the crew went so far as to include FBI seals to some of the
discs! Officials seized approximately a half million discs in the raid and they
also confiscated 5,500 stampers that were used in the illegal manufacturing
operation. The three men face up to five years in prison for each of the five
counts charged against them, including copyright infringement, trademark
violations and trafficking in counterfeit labels. It is interesting that the
different steps in manufacture can carry a separate
punishment!

Source: Yahoo!