Cram school teachers and owners investigated for selling illegally reproduced materials worth TWD1 billion

　On April 25, 2024, the Intellectual Property Rights Investigation Corps of the Criminal Investigation Bureau announced a copyright infringement case, in which four individuals, including the responsible persons and employees of the cram schools located in Taichung and Changhua, are suspected of illegally reproducing the teaching materials, exam papers, and exam questions owned by well-known publishers, such as, Kang Hsuan Educational Publish Corp., and further using these reproduced materials and also selling them to other cram schools and even on e-commerce platforms, such as, Shopee, with a total of 6,000 transactions completed and involving illegal profits amounting to TWD2 million.  This case will be referred to the relevant district prosecutors offices on charge of Copyright Act violation.  

　The police initiated raid actions on the two cram schools in Changhua County and Taichung City and the four individuals’ residences in a period from March 13, 2024 through March 29, 2024, seizing around 6,000 illegally reproduced exam papers, over 200 infringing CD-ROM disks of teaching materials, and 1 batch of CD-ROM copying machines.  The Intellectual Property Rights Investigation Corps requested the infringed publishers to examine these seized items and the loss involved in this case was assessed to be in an astonishing amount of TWD1 billion.  Moreover, these infringing materials also included the exam papers exclusively used by school teachers as reference for preparing exam papers, which has seriously affected students’ rights and fairness of examination at school.  Furthermore, as the seized items are in vast quantity including physical materials and electronic files on CDs and part of them are still required to be examined, this case will be referred to the Changhua District Prosecutors Office and Taichung District Prosecutors Office for investigation for Copyright Act violation after all seized items have been fully processed.  (Released 2024.04.25)
/CCS