I recently talked about how Microsoft shut down an enormous software knock-off ring worth millions of dollars, saying:

It seems to me that a lot of the difficulties of fighting terrorism are inherent in the fight against piracy of copyrighted materials: capture/kill one, and three more pop up somewhere else.

An article in the Taipei Times today suggests I might not have been to far off:

Now Microsoft is eager to talk about the experience because taking down that operation -- responsible for about 90 percent of the fake software the firm found between 1999 and 2004 -- didn't actually stop piracy. It just left room for more counterfeiters to rise. Microsoft hopes would-be pirates will think twice if they know how far it will go to protect the computer code worth billions in revenue each quarter.

The article later noted that, while the number of "near-perfect" ripoffs dropped, it was only temporary, as another Chinese enterprise jumped in.