Mumbai Police seizes Adobe SW worth Rs 6.5 lakh

The Mumbai Police has raided four Mumbai based companies–Foto Fantasy Digital Studio, Fantasy Photo Lab, Foto Art Digital Studio and Colo Photo Shop–for alleged unauthori-zed storage and usage of Adobe software in violation of The Copyright Act, 1957. The above-mentioned studios are based in Thane. 

The raid was conducted under the supervision of DCP Amar Jadhav and the crime branch team of the Mumbai Police.

Several systems contain-ing pirated Adobe software were seized. The seized sys-tems contained Adobe softw-are including Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe Photoshop 6.0, Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Adobe Image Ready 3.0, Adobe Image Ready 7.0 and Adobe Type Manager. Also seized was the company’s flagship product Adobe PageMaker 6.5.

Prior to the action by police, Adobe representatives approa-ched all the four photo studios to purchase licensed software and to purchase additional licenses if they found a short fall. However, the company did not pay heed to the representa-tions made by Adobe represe-ntatives. At the raid five company executives were reportedly arrested and a criminal case has been booked under sections 14,51,63, 63 (B) of Copyright Act, 1957 at Thane Police Station,
Mumbai.

Commenting on the raids, Sandeep Mehrotra, Channel Account Manager, Adobe, said, “Adobe has been educating the market on the disadvantages and perils of using pirated software. In the past few months we have stepped up our efforts to help companies to do software audits and have been offering avenues to res-olve the issues of compliance and work towards a solution. It gives us immense satisfaction to see the initiatives Gover-nment of India is taking to curb piracy. We would like to thank the judiciary for the support they have extended to Adobe by conducting the criminal raids across the country.”

Cyber News Service