Shame the plods aren't quite so zealous about investigating thousands of illegal wire taps by the countries biggest ISP.

What about pricing software at reasonable level so customers don't need to "pirate" it? What about different prices in different countries for the same software? I wonder how many of those "pirated" boxes were imports from US.

I'm looking at you MSFT and Adobe...

This is value from customers, not value to the distributor, since the customer payment pays for costs of distributing, manufacturing, marketing and sale process. All of which is done by the "pirate". The corporation doesn't have to pay taxes on that too, which reduces the value of the product to the legal distributor.

Secondly, if this really DID have a value of £1m for just this one raid, how much money were the "pirates" making? £1m per week? Then inventory lasts a week. £1m a year? Then inventory lasts a year. But if it lasts a year, then that's not so good, is it. That shows there's not a lot of demand for the product. Of course, the low rate of renumeration could be because they were selling copies for 10% of the retail price. However, that then makes the value of the product (in this case) £100,000. From which the corporation would have to pay the expenses of servicing this sale.

It could also be "£1m worth of software" in the same way as Time sold PC's with "£2000 worth of software" on a £999 PC: that was the value when they were new. As remaindered stock or very out of date software, the value is much, much lower.

Not defending the marketer, but I am pointing out the ridiculous claim of value.

£1,000,000 value for 5,000 items means an average of £200 per item on full RRP. That's not games, music or films, that's likely to be mostly Office/Windows/Photoshop type apps. The £100,000 value put on the goods themselves suggests they were being sold for about £20 each. If anyone really thinks they can buy legit software for 1/10 of the RRP, well...

£1,000,000 for 5,000 games? Wouldn't that value them at £200 a piece?

The police really do need to invest in some calculators...

neither, it wasn't 1,000,000 or 100,000, it was (25p X number of blank DVDs) + (cost of leccy X amount used to burn images)

That's the true value of what they had cos the people they were selling it to wouldn't have bought the originals at full price anyway.

A pirate copy is just a pirate copy. It's NOT a lost sale.

"Though the value of the pirated items was estimated by trading standards officials to be £100,000, the value of that number of geniune products would have been £1m, said the West Yorkshire Trading Standards Service (WYTSS)."

So they accept that the piracy was minimal and felt it necessary to exaggerate. The exaggeration is an admission that the problem is minimal. If it wasn't minimal they wouldn't have to exaggerate!

I'm guessing this was some tiny little computer fair where they sell 10 pieces a day, say 200 quids worth/day. In order to have 1 million worth of games that would be 20000 50 quid discs, not exactly plausible given how many people attend these tiny fairs.

The trading standards exaggeration of 100k's worth sounds more plausible, say they had 10 copies each of 200 games, at 50 quid full price. Obviously we're stretching it to say 50 quid and 200 games, but at least it's more believable.

My guess is they had 30k equivalent of stock, i.e. 1000 DVDRs max and it represents lost sales to the manufacturers of 1-2k.

"What about different prices in different countries for the same software? I wonder how many of those "pirated" boxes were imports from US.

I'm looking at you MSFT and Adobe..."

You forgot to include one other large company...

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/04/25/apple_grey_ipods_etailer/

The wonderful British Police going for the soft option again. I'm sure after they'd completed this wonderful piece of police work, they positioned themselves along the road outside the computer fair to catch some unsuspecting motorists doing 31mph in the 30 zone.

I'm sure Microsoft along with the rest of all law abiding citizens will be incredulously happy that pirated copies of Office 2007 will be off the streets of Bradford.

Shame the police can't do anything about real issues which could affect real people such as being hit by an uninsured driver from Bradford. The BBC reported earlier in the year that, "nearly 60% of vehicles in some parts of Bradford are not insured". http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/7247429.stm

Having said that, driving with no insurance only lands you with a £200 fixed fine (or just possibly an appearance before magistrates) whereas stealing from Microsoft may cost you 10 years behind bars.

Nice to you that if you're unfortunate enough to be hit by one of the 60% of uninsured drivers in Bradford whilst driving to a computer fair to purchase illicit software, the law is fully behind you and will punish the miscreant severely.

Paris because at least she has a nice ass, as opposed to the law which merely is one.

I have been to computer fairs or car boot sales in Leeds where this is common practice and I can guarantee even now some of the items being sold are as old as Office 97, on sale for £2.50. Someone will buy this because they want something to put on their PC so their kids can type coursework (not everyone knows of OpenOffice). £1m is a massively exaggerated figure, they may as well have arrested the guy under anti terrorism laws too!

>£1m a year?

>But if it lasts a year, then that's not so good, is it.

Dunno, it's more than I get paid..

>That shows there's not a lot of demand for the product.

They might be niche products, I wouldn't buy CAD software at any price, but some people need it and will pay thousands.

You can get substantially more than one product on a disc as well of course.

This is not hard.....

They are saying the goods were worth £100,000. This is what the conterfiters were selling them for.

However if the software had been genuine software, it would have been worth £1,000,000.

It's not hard for cripes sake!

You have a stolen car worth £100,000. You sell it for £10,000.

The car is worth £100,000 to the owner and £10,000 to the thief.

And if you did a computer fair you's see how much money changes hands. We shifted £10k of laptops a few years back in 4 hours. However the margins are usually very low, we made a few hundred quid, unless of course you are selling software that cost pence to make and sells for £20 a copy.

Doing 31 outside the Richard Dunn Centre is ok, the limit is 40 :D

As for 60% being uninsured? Drive through on a regular basis and you would realise it has to be more because 99% of them cant have a license they drive that poorly so why bother with insurance.

And the figures the police quote for retail value will come from the BSA, who are usually like "OMGWTF Quicken 98 discs, thats like ripping off god, 1 million fine please"

Actually cant be arsed about the story, just wanted an excuse to slag off Bradford drivers.

So if I print ten copies of a Van Gogh or Monet at A2 on my large-format inkjet, and offer them at a couple of quid each, would that be £20 of illicit goods......

.....or would Plod claim it at £125,000,000.00 (10 x assorted Van Goghs and/or Monets)

Paris, 'cos she's turned "dumb" into an art-form......

Personally I think there's a moral difference between filesharing something and making copies to sell. The latter isn't merely distributing, it's actually profiting from a criminal action which, as I recall, carries a few extra penalties under UK law. As a some-time software developer I don't particularly mind people sharing my (crap) writing around, nor even the software I write - hence the GPL - but if someone were to start *selling* it then I'd be very angry.

I know I'm not making as much sense as I'd like here but I think the point is that, in cases where a trader is passing off illegal copies as genuine and profiting from it, they don't have a leg to stand on. It's not any sort of moral statement and it *is* essentially theft, inasmuch as they are making a profit from something that had no part in creating, and inasmuch as a company willing to take the initial hit and drop its pricing down to that level could well stand to make quite a few extra sales. The fact that they aren't doing that doesn't make this particular act any less reprehensible. They're not stealing in the classic sense but they are profiting from a criminal enterprise, which is something you could never say about stuff on p2p. It's like the difference between Robin Hood and your more average highwayman.

Also I could say a thing or two about Bradford and not being surprised but I won't... oh wait, I just did. Never mind!

There will not have been £1,000,000 worth of stuff at the computer fair if you added up the value of everything there including the building.

I know these idiots. I can picture their faces right now. They've been there for ages. They've got a partner outfit at the Trafford Centre in Manchester, and I think they're also the same bunch that turn up with a few thousand pirated DVDs at the car boot in Pontefract. They're all on mobiles to each other, and they keep their kit in zip up bags. Soon as the fuzz arrive they clear the table in five seconds flat and leg it. It's hilarious. Like cockroaches with the light on.

On a more serious note, the fairs have been letting this go on way too long without doing anything about it. Good to see someone finally taking some action.

Yup, never said it wasn't illegal profit.

I did say it wasn't what the value of the raid was.

And would you buy a CAD package to teach how to use it (for yourself/a friend/family)? Well, 350 quid is a lot just to find out. So get a bootleg copy for £5.

"counterfeit software"

As their is little point in trying to sell what you can get for free I'm safe in assuming that most of this software is Microsoft? So the users are obviously Microsoft users which would explain why there are never any comments about the security risks involved in using pirated software?

Typical dumbass Microserfs.

"There will not have been £1,000,000 worth of stuff at the computer fair if you added up the value of everything there including the building."

Oh, how you underestimate the value of land in this country...

Firstly, genuine students get large* rebates on AutoCAD (however the student edition leaves watermarks in your cad files and on your drawings too, from what I remember).

Secondly, there is a time-limited trial version of AutoCAD available.

Thirdly, there are several cheap or free for personal use 2D CAD packages that work similarly enough to 2D AutoCAD that you won't be lost in it (google intellicad). They lack the advanced 2D and 3D modelling abilities and CAD-CAM integration of recent AutoCAD versions however, but they are perfectly adequate for draughting.

*For certain values of large, as defined using a dartboard at AutoDesk.

So you can rape someone and kill someone and still do half the time you might if you copy some CDs and sell them. NICE!

Seen these types working the crossgates carboot some years ago, may not be the same outfit but the usual practice, burn lots of disks at home in the week, then turn up on a sunday morning and sell them out of bags/flight cases, usually 3 disks for a tenner, though some did 5, often let anonymous kids stand the stall for a wage, kids dont get same sentence....

Going back to the PS1 days but no doubt now its just the same, and you got films too.

Cant see it being anything like the amount of money involved thats claimed, nor does it support terrorism/drugs/crime, they just found a simple but illegal business model and exploited the greed of the customer, whos to blame when GTA4 just cost my lad nearly 50 quid ?

When I bought software that had taken like a years development it cost 9.99 for my amstrad, it was a cutting edge machine then, so why is it now 50 quid for a game with a years development on a cutting edge machine?

Its not like other IT / PC items are costing 5 times as much, hell my 8 bit amstrad was 300 quid, 200 for the disk drive, 180 for a printer, now that would cost about 150 for a pc, 10 quid for a floppy, and 40 quid for a printer, and it would kick the ass out of the old kit, by that analogy, GTA4 should be about £5.99..............

Oh dear, you really don't get inflation, hopefully your employers pay you more than 3 shillings a week.

Hows that brand new Ford that cost £2000? Or fancy a 3 bed house in London, your's for a mere £100,000.

Sorry but, I know this may come as a suprise, but things do go up dear....Not like in the good ol days when you could get a bag of chips, I night out at the cinema and the bus home, and still have change from a penny.....

Did you lean on your dot key at the end or something?

The difference being software for your Amstrad was more than likely done by one guy in his basement. I was as a game developer's office the other day, and they have three massive buildings filled with programmers and artists. That doesn't include the guys that do sound, the engine, AI or anything like that. ames are big business now, and they've got a lot more expenses.

As a sidenote, GTA4 has been in development for much longer than a year, probably more in the region of three.

No need to nick it then eh?

Are you trying to suggest that the value estimate should be marked down on the basis that some people might have qualified as students or for a free trial on something anyway?

Piracy does harm businesses.

If your business is selling an inexpensive photo editing suite, you are going to lose out to people installing pirate copies of Adobe Photoshop. Nobody ever has to make a single pirate copy of **your** program. They're not going to, either -- why would someone rip off £50 of software when they could rip off £500?

All the big software vendors put up with this because they would still rather you were using a pirate version of their product (and therefore maybe acting as an advertisement to anyone else who might just be honest enough to pay for it) than a legitimate version of a competitor's product.

It's not really a lost sale for Adobe if Fred in the Shed is using a knocked-off copy of Photoshop -- he'd never have bought it anyway. (But it **is** a lost sale of some inexpensive photo editing tool -- which, without the option of piracy, he'd have caved in and bought.) But if Fred is using Cheap Photo Editor 2008, gets a job with a magazine, and successfully persuades them that CPE2008 is good enough, **that** is a lost sale for Adobe.

I'm no fan of Caged software, but neither am I keen on tactics like these.

Doesn't anyone watch movies in the cinema? Don't you see the early commercials of how piracy is theft and that piracy supports terrorism? By buying an illegal copy of some software you are helping bin Laden setup a new terrorist training camp in South Wales where he will teach sheep to kill people and become suicide bombers.

Honestly if it was murderers and rapist then this would not happen as Gordon does not risk losing money.

"Oh, how you underestimate the value of land in this country..."

I thought we were talking about Bradford? :)

The article starts off by saying that they had nicked the pair for selling chips that allowed illegal games to be played - since when were mod chips illegal? I've never seen a clear explanation of whether or not they are illegal (I've had all my consoles chipped from my megadrive, PS1, DS, XBox etc but 'mostly' so I can backup, use homebrew or try before buying).

Isn't there some legal FUD that says you can posess them and buy/sell but not install them or are they just totally against the law - if so, which law.

I'm intrigued how something like the CycloDS cartridge which doesn't involve opening up the console at all and turns a DS into a homebrew capable machine and mp3 player can be calssed as wrong?

>> On the £1million value

Indeed. The 'Street Value' is entirely different. E.g. if it were 425 copies of the complete Adobe CS3 package which normally sell for (say) £2350, but were being sold for (say) £30, that would be a street value of £12,750 as opposed a "value" of £1,000,000. Then again, you could say the street value is nothing, because that is how much it might cost if it were downloaded.

I wonder what the "value" would be if it were a single cracked Vista Business and Server 2008? It could be installed across an enterprise that would cost millions for legit software, or it could be installed by a single person at home perhaps on virtual machines running on a single PC.

The northern computer markets in Bradford and Leeds have been spoilt by this for years. A computer fair used to be a place to buy hardware that wasn't necessarily on the cutting edge cheap, but recently it's a car boot of pirated stuff.

'bout bloody time. Now can we get back to decent computer fairs again?

I really don't understand why people pay money for warezed software or movies? Broadband is now widely available and its not hard to find places on the internet where you can download all the software, music, movies or TV shows you want for nothing or at least the price of 1 of these rip off disks.

Being a Bradford lad I agree that the standard of driving is bad, or at least that's what I thought until I moved to Italy a couple years ago. Bradford drivers are saints and drive superbly compared to your average Italian...

Yup I take the points in reference to my statement that gta4 should be 5.99, I was comparing it to hardware, but thats the validation for the point, if the hardware can come down in value, and needs just as much r&d as any piece of software, then the software price CAN come down to something reasonable, hell I can buy a rewriter for less than 30 quid!

@bradford computer fares and getting back to the good ol days, how many 'people' pay the entrance fee to get in to buy this pirated software, irrespective of if they would buy it full price or not, I bet attendance goes down, and the fares go shortly afterwards as organisers see a profit drop, seen it in other places like here in york etc, all the meets/fares etc dried up when piracy was stopped years ago.

The mod chips generally goes to evidence of piracy as opposed to being illegal in themselves. So, sell them together then it also looks like you are encouraging piracy, which may be another offense.

As to the wire tapping - all of these people who like to think that the web is somehow akin to speakers corner (which goes to their poor argument that their activity is not illegal), could be thwarted by licensing web sites.

Just sticking up a notice saying this software cannot be intercepted etc. may very well create an interesting legal position in the future, where phorm and the like can then have charges of copyright infringement and licensing violation put at them.

In fact just a simple copyright notice should do it. Unless phorm is a one man operation, they are using copyrighted material to support their operation without having gained the permission of the copyright holder.

Most interesting since when is mod chipping illegal under the common and fair use laws and so the B***S*** and hyperventilating hype continues on to another level.

But then again , I suppose by the time the DPP gets his cold dead hand on the case the big red pen will have eliminated the propaganda and sliced through much of the fat added by the mass media of misinformation !

There's an old tradition in the UK of enforcing US law. I've come across it a number of times, going back to the 80s with companies being prosecuted for moving minicomputers between facilities without an export license. I'm not sure why you do it.

(Bradford police do know that the DMCA is US law, do they?)

People buy pirated software for various reasons, including:

- They are too lazy or too clueless to download it themselves

- They fondly imagine they are doing someone a favour

- They are too stupid to realise it is not genuine

- They don't understand that there are Open Source alternatives for nearly all software.

As usual, they miss the point. A person who can only afford a ten quid game isn't likely to be in the market for it at 60 quid. It would stay in the shop. So the "equivalent value" is tosh - it's making the totally false assumption that every pirate copy sold is a genuine copy not sold. Any evidence for this? I think the evidence is all the other way.

I think that Phorms get out for copyright violations etc, is to consider themselves as part of the network, not an end point.

Much as a router is for instance.

>A person who can only afford a ten quid game isn't likely to be in the market for it at 60 quid.

Yet when a new GTA comes out everyone suddenly has some money?

It's no use using the "I can't afford it therefore it should be free" argument, if you can't afford it, then you should find a way to get the money for it, not just nick it.

You can pirate software all you want, but don't go pretending that you're on some moral high ground doing it. You still just take something that isn't yours to take.

>The maximum penalty for crimes under copyright and trademark legislation carries a sentence of ten years imprisonment.<

so I only get three years for violent porn.

Of course, the reality is, assuming Bradfords finest don't 'lose' the evidence, that the pirates will get six months or community service...

The trading standards bods didn’t find all the pirated goods at this one computer fair but at the house that they raided .

As far as selling pirate videos etc.most are hawked around factories and offices especially where access is easy DVDs for a fiver(£5) games for probably the same and as they don't come in cases but in plastic "envelopes" one can pack a lot in to a small back pack 300/400 that’s £1500/2000 easy money probably in a couple of days

"Of course, the reality is, assuming Bradfords finest don't 'lose' the evidence, that the pirates will get six months or community service..."

That much????

More like 200 quid fine, buy the stash back from the plods for 500 and back in business next week.

All this tosh about maximum sentences makes me laugh, since when has a court ever sent someone down for the max term? Or for that matter when has a crim ever SERVED more than the minimum allowed sentence, more often less than the minimum due to the state of this country's prison service. As is usual this gov,ment has passed another law that is in practice unenforcable due to the state of the country's legal system. I wonder why the plods even bothered with this as the man hours involved to bring this to court will be so great in relation to the final outcome they would have been better off with a softer target, like a speed camara down the road as has been suggested here.

you makes your choices you takes your action you get caught so don't cry.