Lets begin with most ridiculous story about piracy. As we all know poor Billy lose his bread and butter with every unduly installed copy of Windows or Office software. Imagine Russian village in Perm kray (pretty far from Moscow and goddamn far from Europe), where in snow and blizzard evil pirate and director of elementary school Alexander Ponosov (whose second name translated from Russian as Diarrhea) installs Windows XP and Office 2003 into the brand new PCs of school's computer class. For those of you who not so acquainted with Russian software "market" let me introduce it you. In Moscow for example you can buy ANY (this mean all kind of) software with maximum charge of 200 rubbles (about 14,6 American dollars), in other not so advanced cities its far cheaper. They sell stolen software openly at almost all subway stations. If you need hottest movie on DVD - welcome to Moscow we have all with maximum price of 14,6 dollar (if movie you want buy not so new it will go for 8 dollars easily).
So lets get back to mr. Diarrhea. It seems that Russian government wants to save giant pirate market and at same time show to "western friends" that war against pirates is on. Pathetic? Well it works for now.
Ponosov's case in news
http://eng.cnews.ru/news/top/indexEn.shtml?2007/01/10/230643
Ponosov's case in wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponosov%27s_case
