Visit one of the fake markets in Shanghai China, and you can find a treasure trove of pirated software. Gucci bags, too.
A few years back, I went shopping in Shanghai, China and after some fierce haggling walked out with copies of Adobe Acrobat 3D, SolidWorks 2006, AutoCAD 2007, and PTC Wildfire for a mere $22.00.
I also snagged a six season set of The Sopranos for $19.00, since my husband thinks cable TV providers are the spawn of the devil and I was the only person on the planet at the time who had not seen a single episode of the show. Tony who?
It’s always amusing to see how obviously fake some of these fakes are. Note the spelling of PTC WildFire on the package below. It seems the pirates don’t care, and they know their customers don’t care either — there is absolutely no pretense that you’re actually buying the real thing.
Anyone who buys an engineering software package worth thousands of dollars that they bought for a few bucks at a place nicknamed “the fake market” should know that while they may get a working copy of the software, tech support isn’t going to take their call. And they can forget about registering the software or getting in on any upgrades.
You’d think. But in a noteworthy case a few years back, a brazen software pirate operating the website called BUYSUSA was caught after selling millions of dollars of CAD software when customers who purchased the product at a ridiculously low price contacted CAD companies looking to register or upgrade their software.
Now that’s hootzpah!
A version of this post appeared originally in Electronics Weekly Made by Monkeys blog.
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