Russian Court Decides School Teacher Doesn't Deserve Siberian Prison For Buying PCs With Pirated Windows
from the but-why-was-he-in-court-in-the-first-place dept
Following the high level political appeals from Russian officials to Microsoft about how ridiculous it was that a Russian school head teacher faced Siberian imprisonment because the computers he bought for his students had pirated copies of Windows pre-installed, it appears that the Russian courts have agreed. They’ve thrown out the case, saying that it was “trivial.” Prosecutors could still appeal — but with so many people against them hopefully they decide it’s not worth it. In the meantime, all the publicity still has Russian schools thinking about alternatives to proprietary software. It’s beginning to sound like this whole case was something of a charade. The US has been putting pressure on Russia to “crack down” on intellectual property violations, saying how they won’t let Russia into the WTO unless they do things like shut down Allofmp3.com. It appears that a case like this probably initially seemed like a good idea, where Russian officials could point to an example of them “cracking down” on intellectual property violations. Then the details became clear and everyone realized they were sending a school teacher who was just trying to educate his students to prison.
Comments on “Russian Court Decides School Teacher Doesn't Deserve Siberian Prison For Buying PCs With Pirated Windows”
Yey for common sense
I’m amazed it took a judge to figure it out
At least one country seems to have IP saavy courts
Re: Yey for common sense
IP saavy courts? What on earth are you talking about? Do you even know what that means?
Re: Re: Yey for common sense
101
IP saavy – to know and understand the issues, limitations and applications of intellectual property law and its violations
i.e. that this wasn’t one of them
:p
Re: Yey for common sense
Enrico Suarve wrote:
While I applaud the court’s decision, I’m not so sure you can attribute it to IP-savviness. President Putin had already stated he thought the case was “complete nonsense, simply ridiculous”, so it could very well be that the judge simply took a cue from that.
Re: Re: Yey for common sense
Fair point but yey anyway ;0)
It just cheered me up a little to hear he wasn’t getting sent to Siberia to help his political masters make a point
When asking yourself why there are so much hatred, viruses and security oriented attacks on the MS software franchise, please refer to the series of articles linked above.
Between this and the blatant ripoff of everything designed by Mac I can’t wait until Microsoft has a full monopoly of everything computerized. I can rest assured that every system I put together in prison work camp is being used by a blameless, law abiding servant-citizen.
Re: Re:
Apple didn’t design or invent the original GUI , Xerox did. Apple copies and improves on existing ideas just like every other tech company out there. I isn’t like Apple invented mp3 players or laptops, they just happen to make really good products and people like them. Don’t come down on MS for trying to protect their IP. Apple protects it’s IP, trade marks and patents just as vigorously. Apple has tried to trade mark anything with “pod” in it and actually have filed law suits against companies that use “pod” in their product name. Although, Apple probably would have given OS licenses to a school at little or no cost.
Just further proof..
“the US has been putting pressure on Russia to “crack down” on intellectual property violations, saying how they won’t let Russia into the WTO unless they do things like shut down Allofmp3.com.”
The US is a gigantic mass of bumbling fools who can’t see past their greedy little hands with a death grip on every cent they can get. Apparently we would rather reject Russia, the 2nd largest nuclear power in the world, from joining the WTO because the music industry lobbyists will pull out campaign contributions. The US is facing more and more problems, primarily in agriculture due to the earth’s NATURAL changing weather cycle. Russia is primarily farmlands, and always has been. Their climate is generally the same all the time. Instead of inviting them into the WTO to help alleviate some of the pressure for the US to feed the world, we’d rather reject them because they wont shut down a website? Well with moronic thinking like that it’s no wonder they keep entering into new deals with China. I pray someone in congress will actually take the time to acknowledge the US foreign policy is an archaic relic that needs to be abolished, and grow themselves a spine to standup for what’s right. If nuclear winter doesn’t kill us all first, an epidemic of aneurisms will due to continual exposure to this level of idiocy.
Re: Just further proof..
Great post! 🙂
It really is absurd that we would let business decide what we do. wait…special report in from Exxon, I guess now we are invading Iran
Reed
I find it odd that people claim that Microsoft stole the MAC interface when, in fact, Jobs cleverly persuaded East Coast executives of Xerox to order their computer scientists in Palo Alto to give Steve a dog-and-pony show. Steve knowingly took valuable intellectual property from Xerox without paying a cent.
Then Steve wanted Microsoft to port its popular word-processor from DOS to their Apple OS, so they had to reveal how their OS worked, essentially revealing their implementation of Xerox’s technology.
I don’t think MS did anything improper in this scenarion.
—
Richard