Hi-tech pirate nabbed

By Staff Writer for Microsoft
Johannesburg, 10 Sep 2008

A Port Elizabeth (PE) businessman is being prosecuted for selling hundreds-of-thousands of rands worth of counterfeit Microsoft software.

Packaged to look like the real thing, and featuring simulated holograms and counterfeit certificates of authenticity, the goods were being sold out of Vikesh Singh's PE Technologies shop, in Newton Park, PE.

Singh was arrested following a raid by the South African Police Service's Commercial Crimes Unit. The arrest was the culmination of extensive investigation, including undercover test purchases, after several complaints by local end-users and other resellers in the region.

This week, Singh was released on R5 000 bail. Microsoft has not made the exact value of the alleged software counterfeiting known, due to the fact that legal proceedings are still under way.

Dale Waterman, Microsoft's corporate attorney for anti-piracy in the Middle East and Africa, accompanied police on the raid. "These are high-quality counterfeits that we are dealing with," he says.

"Evidence uncovered during the raid points to the supply of products manufactured by a global counterfeiting syndicate from the Far East. People could easily buy this with the best of intentions, only to find later - when they try to register, or obtain support - that they have been conned."

According to Waterman, consumers can also be caught out by the common practice of "hard-disk loading" - in which PC suppliers install unlicensed software onto a PC and then sell it, often without a genuine certificate of authenticity or the original media, at a full or often discounted price.

Microsoft SA anti-piracy manager Charl Everton says earlier this year, Microsoft reached settlements totalling hundreds-of-thousands of rands with 21 local computer dealers selling computers loaded with unlicensed Microsoft software.

He quotes IDC research indicating the global computer industry loses more than $10 billion a year from pirated desktop software.

According to Everton: "In SA, one in every three copies of our software is used illegally. Estimates suggest that reducing piracy by 10 percentage points over four years could generate an extra 1 200 jobs in the local IT sector, R6 billion in local industry revenue, and R490 million in additional tax revenue."