Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Pirates operating a ring of Web sites selling counterfeit business software have been convicted and sentenced by the Department of Justice. Two brothers, Maurice and Thomas Robberson were sentenced March 7th to 36 and 30 months, respectively, in prison as ringleaders of the group. Both were also ordered to pay large sums in restitution, totaling more than a million dollars between them.

Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher said, “People who steal the intellectual property of others for their personal financial gain, while defrauding consumers who think they are buying legitimate products will be punished for their crimes, as today’s sentences prove. The prosecution of these and other defendants related to this multi-year investigation of Internet piracy software operations would not have been possible without the combined efforts of the Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, and the FBI.”

Two other individuals that conspired with the Robbersons had been previously convicted and sentenced for their successful attempt to defraud customers, many of which were businesses. The group operated a number of Web sites selling the counterfeit software titles, many of which purported to be from major software manufacturers such as Adobe, Autodesk, and Macromedia, among others.