14 DAY TRIAL // The Izvestia daily announced a first in matters of IT-related convictions. According to the newspaper, a Russian engineer, owner of a small computer company, was convicted for causing damages to US companies Microsoft and Autodesk by installing pirated software on clients' computers.
The court in the city of Rostov-on-Don decided that Pavel Sakhno, director of Servis+ had committed a very serious act against the software giants, and was sentenced to a year in jail and fined the equivalent of 860 dollars, nowhere close to the nearly 9,500 dollars in damages he caused the US companies by installing pirated software on customers' computers.
But this time, it's not the amount of money that was "stolen" that matters, but the fact that for the first time, someone was convicted just for installing pirated software. Until now, only those who produced illegal copies and sold them were at risk of being sentenced. This means a precedent has been established and the computer copyright laws can act on a more severe degree against pirates.
The sentence comes at the dawn of Russia's preparations for a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation next week in Hong Kong, where Moscow hopes to conclude the preliminary stages of its negotiations to join the global trade bloc.