The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA),
working on behalf of its member companies, settled the case against
Kevin Liu and GT Tian who also agreed to stop selling illegal
software and provided the SIIA with records identifying their
customers and suppliers.
The suit, brought in the name of Symantec Corporation in the
United States District Court for the Central District of
California, was among the first filed under SIIA’s Auction
Litigation Program, which aims to monitor popular online auction
sites, identify pirates and prosecute them. The SIIA said it was
launched in part because current anti-piracy strategies, such as
taking down auctions through eBay’s Verified Rights Owner (VeRO)
programme, have not adequately remedied the problem.
Liu and Tian completed well over 8,000 auctions on eBay over the
past two years, according to the SIIA. They sold software having a
retail price of more than $750,000, for approximately $123,000.
In an SIIA statement, defendant Kevin Liu said: “If I had known
that SIIA was checking eBay for software piracy, and if I had known
the software was pirated and that I'd have to pay such a high fine,
I would have never sold the pirated software to begin with.”
