Police have seized about US$1 million worth of contraband and arrested 17 people in the biggest single haul of pirated software in Singapore, officials said yesterday.
Some 124,000 pieces of illicit computer programs, video games and music CDs were recovered Tuesday from a syndicate based in a flat, with 10 retail outlets located in public housing estates.
"This is the largest piracy syndicate police have smashed," a Singapore Police press statement said, adding that more arrests were expected.
PHOTO: AFP
It said the Business Software Alliance, a group which fights intellectual piracy worldwide, along with representatives of the computer gaming, movie and music industries, were helping police identify the seized articles.
"Of course we are very pleased by the action taken by the police," said Tarun Sawney, regional enforcement manager for the software alliance.
The suspects arrested in police raids across the island included 16 men and one woman, aged 16 to 58.
Under Singapore law, people found guilty of selling or distributing works which are protected by copyrights or trademarks can be jailed for up to five years and fined a maximum of US$57,000.
"The police do not tolerate such [a] blatant form of piracy activities," assistant superintendent Elaine Ying, head of the intellectual property rights branch of the police, said in the press statement.
"We will spare no efforts in detecting and eliminating the syndicates and [their] members. Intellectual property piracy is illegal but many are tempted to share its spoils," she said. "They are mistaken if they think that the risk is worth taking."
The Straits Times newspaper reported that the contraband was believed to have been usually smuggled by car from neighboring Malaysia.
Malaysia is reputed to be a major source of pirated movies, software and CDs sold in Southeast Asia.
The latest Singapore seizure came one month after another major haul of counterfeit software and movies worth some US$600,000 in the Orchard Road tourist belt, which resulted in five arrests, the Straits Times said.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
RSS