This is the most important thing that has happened on the intellectual property front lately. Former Soviet president Gorbachev asks Microsoft’s Bill Gates not to pursue IP litigation against a high school teacher in Perm who used pirated software in classroom because:
– he is poor
– he is dedicated his life to teaching
– he was just using pirated software, but has not installed and/or downloaded it,
– because the possible punishment (imprisonment is Siberia) is disproportionate.
The situation is super-interesting because if Gates does not do anything (claiming that he cannot, or can but not willing to) intervene, that will create super -bad PR not only for him as a philanthropist and Microsoft, as a company, but for all IP cases as well.
But by intervening, he admits, that such legal actions around the world are initiated by a handful of individuals like him, and he also admits that there are exceptions from copyright infringement, in some or all of the cases above.
Seems very much like a loose-loose situation.
Prosecutors accuse Ponosov, headmaster of a middle school in the Perm region, of violating Microsoft’s intellectual property rules by using computers in his school that contained unlicensed copies of the firm’s software.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Monday asked Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates to intercede on behalf of a Russian teacher
accused of using pirated software in his classroom.“A teacher, who has dedicated his life to the education of children and
who receives a modest salary that does not bear comparison with the
salaries of even regular staff in your company, is threatened with
detention in Siberian prison camps,” read the letter, posted on the
Internet site of Gorbachev’s charitable foundation www.gorby.ru.Read the original letter here. (in Russian. Babelfish translation here.)
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