5 Years In Prison For Selling Fake Cisco Gear 239
angry tapir writes "A Virginia woman was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for leading a 'sophisticated' conspiracy to import and sell counterfeit Cisco Systems networking equipment. In addition to the prison time, Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia also ordered Chun-Yu Zhao, 43, of Chantilly, Virginia, to pay US$2.7 million restitution and a $17,500 fine."
Re:speculating about the real purpose (Score:2, Insightful)
Or maybe she just wanted to make a quick buck like the thousands of other people selling counterfeit goods. Stop watching CSI.
You can take the person out of China... (Score:0, Insightful)
You can take the person out of China... ...but you can't take the Chinese out of the person!
Re:Cisco Compatible (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, depending on exactly how "compatible" the stuff being sold is, it could be that the seller is either committing fraud by claiming even compatibility, or committing some flavor of copyright infringement against Cisco; but selling falsely labelled goods will push you across the line from legitimate to criminal almost no matter what the product in question is.
Re:speculating about the real purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
They all work for the Chinese Government....
Re:Question here (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not saying the stuff that the guy who got convicted sold was a perfect clone of the Cisco gear, but if it were, what would be "fake" about it, and would it matter? Does it matter to the bits that flow through it?
Are you serious? When you had a problem with your "Cisco" equipment and called Cisco, do you think they'd help you out with your counterfeit gear?
Re:Question here (Score:4, Insightful)
So your stance is that every single company on Earth must manufacture their own goods in secret. They cannot use a 3rd party factory, because the factory can just steal the plans and cut the designer out the equation. They cannot have a brand, because if they work hard to build consumer trust, some seedy knock-off company can just start using their name and logo. They cannot reveal their nifty new discoveries in a trade journal, as the ideas will just be stolen. If an employee leaves, they can take everything they ever designed with them, and never mind the fact that their salary was meant to be payment for those designs. Authors and musicians and movie makers and game makers have to beg for donations, since no one need pay them for their works.
Your ideas are so poorly thought out, it's almost childlike.
Intellectual property is a necessity for any modern economy. People could get by without such rules back when occupational choices were farmer, hunter, ditch-digger, and prostitute. But today's society is much improved, and those improvements require us to follow certain rules to maintain.
Re:Why is the US govt. playing enforcer for Cisco? (Score:2, Insightful)
You're assuming Cisco is the only victim? What about the buyers? If this equipment is sub-par and goes into mission critical projects, people might die. This was in Virginia, and if the equipment is sold to a government entity and it has back-doors, secrets might be lost and people might die.
Five years seems very reasonable to me.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm wondering whether there was a deeper purpose to importing counterfeited equipment. If such could be successfully sold into government operations, it could then be used for backdoors...
Cisco gear is *made* in China. We're not dealing with pin-heads here, if they wanted to "backdoor" routers, they would at least attempt to "backdoor" the real things with Chinese operatives in Chinese factories where these routers are made, while on Chinese soil...
This, of course, is one of the great weaknesses of the shift of manufacturing away from US soil, we just don't make things anymore.
Not long down the road, all those Filipino maids in the rich palazzos, palaces, and chateaus will be replaced with American maids.
Re:Wrist slap. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes cause we all know just how successful it is to not only destroy peoples lives, but their future any sense of empathy. What you suggest doesn't work, and there is hundreds of years of evidence that it doesn't. The death penalty would be a highly effective measure at deterring crime if anyone gave a rats ass about deterrents. Not a single person considers the consequences of their actions before they commit crimes. Plenty of people have been severely punished for white collar crime. Ken Lay got 30 years, did that stop the bank fraud that caused the economic crash after Enron?
You're a fool if you think there is such a thing as a deterrent and it's even worse if you think destroying someone will make the world a better place. In fact based on your post you are probably stupid enough to think prison rape does anything at all other than destroy lives.
Re:You can take the person out of China... (Score:2, Insightful)
Your racist comment is belied by the fact that in THIS VERY SAME ARTICLE the presiding judge is presumably Chinese himself but sought to impose the maximum(?) penalty.
It could be that he is not Chinese (maybe Korean or another nationality) but with the name Gerald BRUCE Lee given to him by hopefully well meaning parents, I think it is more than likely he is of Chinese extraction.
Re:speculating about the real purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
They all work for the Chinese Government....
Well it beats unemployment
Re:speculating about the real purpose (Score:4, Insightful)