[See Pirate Software – Go Directly to Jail, Part 1 here]

A profoundly insightful analysis of our criminal justice system was once extolled by the great agri-proponent and western philosopher Nelson (in harmony with colleague Keith) in their hit song Beer for My Horses:

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day son,
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done,
Take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree, Round up all of them bad boys,
hang them high in the street, for all the people to see

Truly, an efficient justice system that serves the interest of its citizenry must rely heavily on prosecution and punishment as a deterrent to criminal activity.  Maybe hanging is too extreme, but it is still always wonderful to see software pirates go to prison.  

Thanks to the diligent efforts of the Department of Justice, Timothy Dunaway of Wichita Falls, Texas was captured and sentenced to 41 months in prison. The 24-year old plead guilty to selling counterfeit software with a retail value in excess of $1 million. Dunaway was also ordered to pay more than $810,000 in restitution and forfeit his ill-gotten gains including a Ferrari and a Rolex. 

In addition to celebrating the outcome of this case, software developers and publishers can gain some interesting insights into how pirates operate. From the DOJ press release:

From July 2004 through May 2008, Dunaway operated approximately 40 Web sites that sold a large volume of downloadable counterfeit software without authorization from the copyright owners. Dunaway admitted he operated computer servers in Vienna, Austria and Malaysia. Agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), working in cooperation with foreign law enforcement, seized Dunaway's international computer servers. According to court documents, Dunaway promoted his illicit scheme by purchasing advertising for his Web sites from major Internet search engines. Throughout the entire course of the scheme, the defendant processed more than $800,000 dollars through credit card merchant accounts under his control  

Dunaway proves again that software piracy is not a victimless crime. The million dollars that Dunaway bought his Ferrari and Rolex with rightfully belonged to the software developers and publishers he stole from.

More simply put, the money that was spent by people that wanted to pay for the software would have easily covered the salaries for several programmers. Multiply this by the countless incidents of software piracy every year and you begin to understand the need for better and more widespread use of software DRM and more aggressive pursuit of the worst software pirates. It means jobs for programmers instead of Ferraris for pirates.