Two Texas men have been accused of earning more than $500,000 by selling pirated copies of various Adobe software products, including several program bundles to federal agents in Fairfax, court documents filed in Alexandria’s federal court said.
Robert D. Cook financed the operation and his son Todd A. Cook operated the three Web sites they used to sell the stolen software, an indictment unsealed last week said. Authorities say they sold more than 5,000 unauthorized copyrighted Adobe programs on their three Web sites: bargainsoftwaredownload.com, econo-soft.com and esoftdirect.com. They were arrested Tuesday on copyright infringement charges. Calls to their attorney, Donald Morris, were not returned.
The Cooks allegedly employed others to crack the software codes so they could be easily downloaded through their Web sites after customers often paid considerably less than what they would if they bought the programs from Adobe, court documents said. They advertised the Web sites through Google advertising programs and used Google Checkout and Paypal to process the payments. The Web sites were hosted by Yahoo and began in July 2006.
In May 2007, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Fairfax bought a copy of Adobe Photoshop 8 from econo-soft.com for $79.95, when a copyrighted version typically costs double that amount, the indictment said. Five months later, the agent downloaded a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 from bargainsoftwaredownload.com for $69.95. That program typically costs $900.
The Cooks briefly shut down the operation in April 2008 after the Business Software Alliance sent them an e-mail requesting they cease and desist selling the pirated software, the indictment said. The father and son agreed in an e-mail response, and shut down econo-soft.com and bargainsoftwaredownload.com. But a few days later, they allegedly opened esoftdrect.com to keep their sales going, authorities said. On May 13, 2008, the agent downloaded more underpriced pirated software from esoftdirect.com, the indictment said. It took more than a year for investigators to trace the sales back to the two men.
