How did the Westminster Boys & Girls Club attract Microsoft Corp.’s attention,and a $300,000 cash donation for a new library and upgraded computer lab at the club’s headquarters?
Smashing 40,000 counterfeit CD-ROMs worked pretty well.
The club’s young members spent their summer vacation turning the CDs, part of a seizure of $70 million in counterfeit software, into a 16-foot-by-16-foot wall,which then was destroyed by a marauding monster truck to the delight of the assembled children and families.
The donation was arranged after Westminster Chief of Police James Cook heard that Microsoft planned to give part of what it got back from software anti-piracy efforts to nonprofits. Microsoft said last year it plans to donate about $25 million over the next five years as part of its recovery work.
Cook said his department’s special investigation unit three years ago turned up the initial information that led to a raid last year in Paramount in which the huge haul of bootleg software was confiscated.
“The case started in Westminster and they worked it up through LA,” Cook said. “We found one small tentacle of the octopus.”
The case also involved the FBI and other law enforcement groups.
Monique Lawee, executive director of the Westminster Boys & Girls Club said Microsoft suggested building the wall of software to destroy. The company delivered the 40,000 CDs in two truckloads.
Microsoft said the software raid and the $300,000 gift to the Westminster club are the largest ones to date in its program. It said California’s strong tech industry is attractive to software counterfeiters.
“Unfortunately, (what) has made California home to so many high-tech establishments also makes it a hotbed for software pirates a principal counterfeit software manufacturing center and a lead exporter of counterfeit software,” said Anne Kelley, Microsoft’s senior corporate attorney, in a press release announcing the gift.
Cook says the crime is worldwide, and that one of his men, Sgt. Marcus Frank, who heads the special investigation unit, recently returned from a trip to Vietnam to discuss anti-piracy agreements with Asian governments.
“It’s a classic organized crime (issue),” Cook said. “It’s low-penalty, low-key, low-risk for the criminal,people figure everyone’s doing it ,and there are huge profits out there.”
Frank said that since 1997 the Westminster Police Department had worked counterfeit cases totaling $140 million in seizures. Microsoft said it has grabbed almost 10 million units of counterfeit software nationwide in the past two years.
Lawee said she is just happy to have a place kids can call “home away from home.”
She’s using part of the gift for tech-related improvements at the club.
“We’re building a brand-new library and a new computer lab with DSL hook-ups,” Lawee said. “We’re focusing (the money) on education and have dedicated 20% of our building to the learning center and technology.”
The new facilities will help kids and parents with computer skills, homework and career training and planning, she said.
“This helped us a lot,” she said. n
