1.28.2010

kenneth chou: former taiwanese pop star / med student / test prep pirate

Asian behaving badly... test prep piracy edition! This is the tale of 30-year-old SUNY Upstate Medical University student Kenneth Chou, who paid his way through med school by copying Kaplan lecture DVDs from his school's library and reselling them online: Med Student Turns to Test-Prep Piracy.

Kaplan claims Chou infringed at least 17 copyrighted works and made between $100,000 and $200,000 from selling pirated test prep data. Selling the material through eBay and other sites, Chou charged between $1,000 and $2,000 for a course set that included 70 DVDs.

This is a pretty lame scheme, but what's kind of amusing is the fact that Chou is apparently a former Taiwanese boy-band member. If I'm not mistaken, test prep pirate Kenneth Chou is Kenny, aka Zhou Yi Ming of Machi.
Chou was born in Ohio and grew up in California. He obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of California at Irvine in 2005, but at one point went to Taiwan to cut two rock albums with a boy band called Machi. The albums sold very well in China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore, according to a deposition Chou gave in the case.
Hey, medical school can get pretty expensive. And I guess with his Taiwanese pop star days behind him, the Machi music royalties weren't really paying the bills. But with all the time and energy that probably went into ripping off Kaplan and running this scam, perhaps medical school never should've been this guy's calling in the first place.

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