14 DAY TRIAL // In a country where pirated copies of Windows Vista and the Office 2007 System are sold for just $4 in the center of Moscow, just 1 mile from the Kremlin - the Russian equivalent of the White House - a Russian headmaster was made a scapegoat, and fined over the use of unlicensed Microsoft software.
Alexander Ponosov allowed his students from the Perm region in the Ural mountains, to use 12 computers with preloaded copies of Windows but with fake licenses. Ponosov was accused of violating Microsoft's intellectual property rights, even though the computers running unlicensed copies of Widows were in fact delivered by a sub-contractor.
Ponosov's case got a consistent amount of media attention and was even brought to the attention of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. While Microsoft declined to intervene on behalf of the alleged software pirate, Russian President Vladimir Putin qualified the issue as nonsense, stating that the actual criminals are the counterfeiters, and not their victims.
Ponosov even managed to get the support of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who appealed the teacher's case to Bill Gates. After he was initially found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of 266,000 rubles, approximately $10,000, Ponosov appealed the court's decision and in the latest turn of events, the financial penalty was dropped to 5,000 rubles or $194.
The Russian teacher declared that he is innocent of the piracy claims brought against him and that he will yet again appeal the decision seeking a not guilty verdict. "Our interest is not in prosecuting schools or teachers, it is in helping students develop the technology skills they need in the 21st century," reads a fragment of a Microsoft statement issued in response to the matter.