Court Dismisses Microsoft Piracy Case Against Principal
By Hannah Gardner
Bloomberg
MOSCOW — A Russian court threw out a software piracy case against a school principal after former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev asked Microsoft Corp. to intervene and President Vladimir Putin said consumers shouldn’t be punished for copyright violations. “The case was dismissed because the damages to Microsoft are insignificant,’’ the presiding judge in the case, Vera Barakina, said by phone from Perm, a Ural Mountains city 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow. The principal, Alexander Ponosov, was accused of installing illegal Microsoft software on his school’s computers. The case made headlines across Russia, where bootleg computer programs, movies and music can be bought for a fraction of what licensed goods cost. It was also the subject of the first question Putin fielded during a three-hour news conference this month. Putin called the case “utter nonsense,’’ an opinion seconded by Gorbachev, who wrote an open letter to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates asking him to get involved. Ponosov plans to appeal today’s ruling because it only cleared him of piracy and not of knowingly committing a crime, Barakina said. The piracy charge carries a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison and about $10,000 in fines, Barakina said. “Our interest is not in prosecuting schools or teachers, it is in helping students develop the technology skills they need in the 21st century,’’ Microsoft said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. The Redmond, Washington-based company, which has 19 offices in Russia, didn’t send a representative to Ponosov’s hearing Thursday. Russia is rated the world’s worst piracy market after China, according to a survey by the International Chamber of Commerce. The US cited Russia’s lax attitude toward piracy as one of the country’s main stumbling blocks to joining the World Trade Organization. The US agreed last year to support Russia’s membership in the global trade body, after more than a decade of talks.
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