COPYRIGHT VIOLATION: Lin Jung-peng had also been sentenced earlier to two years in prison for selling 148 types of software that he downloaded from a Chinese Web site.

The Taoyuan District Court yesterday ordered an online dealer of pirated software to pay damages totaling NT$740 million (US$22.52 million) to 10 software companies.

The court estimated that from July 2002 to January 2005, Lin Jung-peng(林榮鵬) earned NT$3 million by selling 148 different types of professional graphics software that he downloaded from a Chinese Web site before being caught by police. The court ordered Lin to pay NT$5 million for each type of software pirated in violation of the Copyright Law
(著作權法).

The court had already ruled last month that Lin must serve a two-year prison sentence, after which the software companies can apply to the court to force him to make monthly payments out of his salary. Lin must also print apologies to the software companies in newspapers.

Acknowledging that Lin might not be able to pay such an astronomical figure, Judge Chen Ching-yi (陳清怡) said the verdict was more symbolic than practical.

Sung Hung-ti, chair of the Taiwanese branch of the Business Software Alliance, an international organization representing software manufacturers, said that the NT$5 million in civil damages per program that the companies claimed was the maximum.

However, the programs that Lin pirated typically sold for less than that on the legal market. Lin sold the programs -- including Advanced Design System, AutoCad, Cimatron and Windows operating systems -- for between NT$8,000 and NT$10,000.

The 10 companies included nine US companies and one Israeli company.

The court awarded US software manufacturer Autodesk the highest amount of compensation at NT$190 million after 38 of its programs were pirated. Parametric Technology Company was second with NT$145 million, and Bentley Systems was third with NT$135 million.

Chen said that buyers of the pirated programs could pass them on to other users, making it impossible to calculate exactly how many other people received pirated copies, as well as contributing to the severity of Lin's infringement of intellectual property rights.

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