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These days there's no reason why people should be pirating Microsoft software anyway, since free software is much better. This applies especially to non-profit
by motters 16y ago
These days there's no reason why people should be pirating Microsoft software anyway, since free software is much better. This applies especially to non-profit organizations or charities, where spending money on software licenses is wasteful of scarce financial resources.
Probably the best strategy for charities and non-profits in this situation is:
a) Encrypt your data. In Linux systems like Ubuntu it's really easy to encrypt your home directory or create an encrypted disk. You don't have to be an expert.
b) Back up your data in "the cloud" or on servers located outside of your country. This makes it harder (but I assume not impossible) for data to be seized arbitrarily.
c) Do as much as possible out in the open anyway (published somewhere on the web) so that there is little or no "secret sauce" to be seized, except perhaps private emails. For charities being as transparent about your operations as possible makes good sense in terms of reassuring donors that their money is being well spent.
- dchest 16y agoThere is a company in Russia that sells "legalization packs" for OpenOffice which include a printed license for OpenOffice, a tech support certificate, stickers for PC, and accounting papers, so that companies have something to show to authorities.
- osivertsson 16y agoThat is all good advice, but we should remember that Baikal Environmental Wave, which is the main focus of the article, did have genuine Microsoft software, including receipts, boxes, and stickers on their computers. Yet their computers were seized for five months and meanwhile Microsoft denied to help them prove that the software was genuine. What is upsetting is that Microsoft is helping the authorities when the targets of these anti-piracy raids clearly is on organizations and journalists that peacefully oppose the Russian authorities in some way. They may run only legitimate software but still a raid is carried out. 'Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev said he now realized that the authorities were not so much interested in convictions as in harassing opponents.'
- motters 16y agoYes, which means that the raid and confiscation of computers, etc, isn't really about copyright enforcement but about grabbing data, making data unavailable for use, or otherwise as the article suggests causing general hindrance. Verifying the legitimacy of Microsoft software, as far as I'm aware, is a fairly trivial matter of checking serial numbers, so this isn't something which would require computers to be seized for significant periods of time, or necessarily even moved from their desks. That Microsoft declined to facilitate the checking of serial numbers after claims of piracy is reprehensible, and all the more reason not to use their software in the first place.