Blackmoor Vituperative

I mentioned the Julie Amero case the other day — the substitute teacher being sent to prison because the computer in her classroom was infected with malware. Lest you think that small-town America is the only place this sort of thing happens, listen to the case of Russian teacher Alexandr Ponosov:

[…] the police in Russia have arrested a software pirate, prosecuted the malefactor to the full extent of the law and are preparing to send the miscreant to a Siberian prison camp.

[…] the Russian courts have convicted Alexander Ponosov, the principal of a middle school in a remote Ural Mountains village, for unwittingly buying PCs for his students that were loaded with unlicensed copies of Microsoft software.

(from eWeek, Sentenced to the Intellectual Property Gulag)

Just to clarify something here: what Ponosov is accused of is not “piracy”. It is not “theft”. There were no cutlass-wielding brigands or black-masked burglars. The crime of which Posonov has been convicted is copyright infringement: the same offense committed by the MPAA when they copied Kirby Dick’s documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated“. For this heinous offense, Ponosov faces a fine of 266,000 rubles, or $10,042, and up to five years in a Siberian prison camp. That’s not a metaphor — that is a literal statement. It is a prison camp in Siberia.

The media robber barons could, in theory, show some mercy to Mr. Ponosov and retract their complaint against him. But sending people like Mr. Ponosov to Siberia is exactly what they want. These are not simply businessmen and women trying to compete in a marketplace — they are monsters.

Mikhail Gorbachev published an open letter on the Web site of his charitable foundation, calling on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to intercede on Ponosov’s behalf on the grounds that the teacher wasn’t aware that PCs contained pirated software. The letter describes Ponosov as a teacher “who has devoted his life to educating children and who is getting for his work a meager salary that can in no way compare with the income that your company average executives are paid” at Microsoft.

“But under the circumstances, we are addressing you with a plea of leniency and withdrawal of claim against Alexandr Ponosov,” said Gorbachev’s letter.

Microsoft cares about children, right? Microsoft isn’t evil, right? Certainly they’d do something, right?

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Microsoft’s public relations agency in London released a statement that the company was “sure that the Russian courts will make a fair decision.” The statement also lauded the Russian government’s effort to prosecute software “piracy” cases, according to the Times report. “We do respect the Russian government’s position on the importance of protecting intellectual property rights,” the statement said.

I am sickened. You should be, too.