Software Pirate Looking At 10 Years In The Brig

Hew Raymond Griffiths is a 44 year old Brit living in Bateau Bay Australia. Or rather was living in Australia; he was extradited to the United States earlier this year to face piracy charges from his time leading the group known as DrinkOrDie which was part of a giant piracy operation. That’s their warez logo up there.

Monday, a US District Court judge sentenced the infamous cracker to 51 months in prison.

Back in the day, his operation covered the UK, Australia, Sweden, Norway and Finland but was founded in Russia in 1993.

DrinkOrDie’s specialty was producing cracks for MS, Adobe, AutoDesk, Novell and Symantec, and of course there were likely many hundreds of other applications or OS’ that were cracked and hosted on their private network to hide it all from law enforcement.

In all it’s estimated DrinkOrDie benefited in over $51 Million dollars of pirated software, one of their claims to fame was releasing a pirated copy of Win95 2 weeks before the product shipped.

To date, the US effort known as “Operation Buccaneer” has resulted in more than 30 felony convictions in the United States and 11 convictions of foreign nationals overseas.