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If you have been chatting on IRC warez channels with someone called Warlock and you haven't seen him for the last 4 months, you might have been chatting with a former Microsoft employee who has been caught for distributing illegal software of the company.
Warlock, named Justin Robbins in his normal life will be spending 7 months in jail for distributing the software of his former employee. Besides that he has changed his mind and now calls what he did theft.
Robbins, who already has been jailed for 3 1/2 months, will serve the rest of his sentence in a residential drug and psychological treatment facility. He's the last of 15 people sentenced for conspiring to infringe thousands of computer program copyrights. "I want to apologize for the crime itself," said Robbins, 26, who had pleaded guilty. "It took me a long time to acknowledge what I did."
About a quarter of all business software in the U.S. is unlicensed, according to the Business Software Alliance. The Washington-based trade group estimates that the software industry lost $1.8 billion in 2001 U.S. sales and billions more worldwide to software theft.
"It's an unfortunate case in that every employee who participated in this did something they knew was wrong," U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly said. "It may seem like it was not theft, but it was."
In addition to the incarceration, Kennelly sentenced Robbins to three years of supervised release and ordered him to avoid drugs and cooperate with substance abuse counseling and mental health treatment. Kennelly also sentenced Robbins to three years of supervised release, requiring him not to use drugs and to cooperate with both substance abuse counseling and mental health treatment.
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