A software pirate responsible for ripping off nearly 8,000 online customers and a handful of leading software vendors was sentenced Monday to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud and criminal copyright infringement charges.
Matthew Thomas Purse, 32, of Gilbert, Ariz. also received three years probation from a federal judge in Phoenix, and was hit with $12,000 in fines and restitution for his role in the elaborate software piracy scam.
Purse, along with Christopher Loring Walters, 29, of Newport Beach, Calif., created multiple eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) merchant accounts between September 2004 and February 2006 from which they sold counterfeit copies of software developed by Apple, Corel, McAfee, Symantec and other vendors.
Walters remains a fugitive, according to a statement released by the Software & Information Industry Association, a trade association for the software and digital content industry that assisted the U.S. Department of Justice in the investigation.
The duo used online sites including SoftwareDiner.com, Thesoftwareyard.com, Argyleeequity.com, Eagletronics.com and Tekdealer.com among others to advertise themselves on eBay as authorized distributors of the counterfeit applications.
According to the SIIA, the top-tier software vendors lost more than $500,000 in sales through the illicit operation.
"Matthew Purse duped nearly 8,000 unsuspecting consumers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars," Keith Kupferschmid, SIIA's senior vice president for intellectual property and enforcement, said in a statement. "He and Christopher Walters cheated software companies such as Adobe, Symantec, Apple, Corel, Intuit and many others out of millions of dollars in revenue."
"Like so many others who sell pirated software online or make illegal copies in the workplace, at least Matthew Purse is now finding out that the justice system takes this crime seriously," he added.
The SIIA along with state and federal law enforcement agencies have racheted up their efforts in recent years to stem the illegal trafficking of counterfeit and stolen software applications at online sites including eBay.
In 2008 alone, IDC estimated that software vendors lost more than $53 billion to software piracy -- an especially galling figure considering worldwide sales of legitimate software applications totaled just over $88 billion that year.
In October, Gregory William Fair of Falls Church, Va. was sentenced to 41 months in te+Gets+41+Months+in+prison for selling bogus copies of various Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE) applications on eBay from 2001 through 2007 -- software worth more than $1.4 million.
"Anyone who thinks software piracy isn't taken seriously should pay close attention to the Matthew Purse case," Kupferschmid said. "When SIIA uncovers software piracy, the offenders often end up paying thousands of dollars in damages. And as Mathew Purse found out, SIIA's investigations can also lead to jail time for these software pirates."
SIIA originally uncovered the pair's massive software piracy scheme and began an investigation that eventually led to the indictment and conviction of Purse. SIIA investigators forwarded the results of its investigation to the DOJ and other government agencies, and then worked closely with them to pursue Purse and others involved in the piracy schemes.
Those efforts led to Purse's guilty plea in February of last year to a series of conspiracy, mail fraud and criminal copyright infringement charges.
Larry Barrett is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the internet.com network.
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