IT company fined for piracy… again

An unidentified Guangdong information technology company has been fined US$17,500 after being caught for a second time using pirated Adobe software, including Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat, the South China Morning Post reported. Although the Tianhe District Court refused to name the company, saying its reputation could be affected, Guangdong IPR lawyer Huang Dehua said the verdict, which came with a relatively high fine, could scare some companies away from using pirated products. Zhou Qingxin, director of the Guangzhou Copyright Bureau's copyright department, said the sentence was part of a nationwide clampdown on pirated software and said similar cases would be brought before the courts in the future. The company was fined US$1,800 in January last year for the same offence, but re-installed the software.