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Police smash VCD pirating ring in Hsichih basement
STAFF WRITER
Friday, May 10, 2002, Page 2
The nation's biggest VCD-piracy bust occurred yesterday morning as police raided the basement of a commercial building in Hsichih (汐止), Taipei County, confiscating hundreds of thousands of counterfeit VCDs and arresting around 30 employees of the Hsin-wei Co (鑫瑋), along with the owner Hu Chung-lin (胡鍾琳), Chinese-language media reported yesterday.
The illegally produced VCDs, found stacked in the basement, included copies of Microsoft's Office 2000, Lotus Smart Suite, Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2002 and pornographic films.
Hu immediately taken into custody for violating the Copyright Law (著作權法).
According to the report, the pirated goods were to be smug-gled into the US, or sold in Taiwan.
The total market value of the confiscated VCDs exceeds NT$500 million, the report said.
This is not the first time that Hu has attracted media attention.
Hsin-wei Co is the new name of Chung-ti Technology (中帝科技), which gained notoriety for its involvement in duplicating the VCD that featurs in the Chu Mei-feng (璩美鳳) sex scandal.
Scoop (獨家報導) magazine distributed VCDs five months ago that featured Chu, the former chief of the Hsinchu City Bureau of Cultural Affairs and her married boyfriend making love.
Hu indicted on Feb. 7 for his involvement in the Chu sex-VCD scandal, along with 10 other defendants.
After his arrest yesterday, Hu denied any involvement in counterfeiting software.
He said that his company possesses authorization from the various software manufacturers.
Taipei City police have invited the software makers to assist in the investigation.
On April 18, the US FBI arrested 27 people in a coordinated crackdown on a large, loosely affiliated group of dealers of counterfeit software in San Francisco, California -- three of whom were suspected of working for Chung-ti Technology.
As part of a joint effort to investigate the intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement case, the Ministry of Justice has dispatched prosecutors to the US and detained Hu and his wife.
Chung-ti Technology's name has surfaced before in connection with alleged IPR violations.
In November 2000, the US seized some pirated software VCDs from Taiwan with a value of more than US$100 million that were later linked to Hu's company.
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