A Russian school principal accused of installing pirated Microsoft software 2007-03-28
A Russian school principal accused of installing pirated Microsoft software in school computers was ordered Tuesday to stand trial for a second time.
The Perm regional court overturned a lower court's February ruling to end the prosecution of Alexander Ponosov, a court spokesman said. The lower court had ruled the case insignificant.
Ponosov, director of a small-town school in the Ural Mountain region of Perm, about 620 miles east of Moscow, had been charged with violating intellectual property rights by installing bootleg versions of the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office software. He insisted that the computers had come with the software already installed and that he did not know that the vendor's certificates were false.
"My position has not changed," Ponosov said Tuesday. "I am innocent. Of course, it is very unpleasant."
But the Perm regional court ruled that the entire case should be sent back to the lower court and heard in full.
Ponosov said, "The court overturned the ruling of the Vereschagin court and returned the case for a retrial. This is what the prosecutor was seeking. I was pushing for an acquittal straight away."
The last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, pleaded with Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, to intercede on behalf of Ponosov. But Microsoft has said that it had nothing to do with the charges and that it declined to file a civil action against the teacher last year.
Both Russian and Western officials say Russia - the biggest producer of pirated goods after China - needs to b
