Microsoft wins intellectual property victory

Paying the price of illegal software

Manchester-based reseller ITAC has been fined £2.5m for infringing software giant Microsoft's intellectual property rights, and its owner sentenced to nine months in prison.

The High Court found ITAC owner Barry Omesuh in contempt of court, and he was given seven custodial sentences to run concurrently. The longest of these was for nine months.

He was also fined £2.5m, part of which will be recouped by the sale of his Spanish holiday home.

Microsoft has been pursuing ITAC since 2004, and has won several legal cases against the reseller for parallel importing – the importing of goods through channels not authorised by the manufacturer. In this instance, ITAC was importing software from a distributor in the Middle East.

"We want to make sure that retailers caught cheating the system are held accountable for their damaging actions," said Graham Arthur, anti-piracy attorney at Microsoft UK, in a statement.

Microsoft won its first case against ITAC in February 2006. It won further cases in September 2008. In March of that year, Microsoft obtained a Court Order freezing Omesuh's assets and ordering him to tell Microsoft where they were.

In the latest case, the High Court found that Omesuh had misled the court about the value of assets he owned, ruling that he was in contempt of court.

"The defendant was a wholly unreliable witness who on his own admission told a number of bare-faced lies about relevant matters over a period of time," said Mrs Justice Proudman, the presiding judge.