The maker of China's most popular pirated edition of the Windows XP computer program has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail in the eastern city of Suzhou, a news report said Friday. The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Suzhou-based news portal subaonet.com as sayingHong Lei, author of the Tomato Garden Windows XP, was sentenced on Thursday by the People's Court of Huqiu District in Suzhou.
He was also fined one million yuan (146,400 dollars). In order to create the pirated Tomato Garden Windows XP, Hong disabled the authentication and certification process of Windows XP.
Xinhua said that in China's biggest software copyright infringement case, Hong and his partners offered downloads of the Windows XP Tomato Garden Edition to at least 10 million users for free, making their profits from advertisements. Hong's partner in the piracy, Sun Xianzhong, received the same sentence.
Two more people were sentenced to two years in prison and each was fined 100,000 yuan. Hong and his partners were arrested between August and December of 2008. Fan Yong, a lawyer for the Gongruan Networking Company, Ltd, told Xinhua his client will decide whether to appeal to Suzhou Intermediate People's Court within 10 days.
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