Officials have raided the offices of media outlets, political parties and private advocacy groups that have criticized the Kremlin for allegedly using unlicensed software.
The Washington Post is reporting an interesting story about how the Russian govt has finally begun to crackdown on the use of unlicensed software in that country. The only kicker is that it’s being accused of selective enforcement for using copyright laws to target independent news media, political parties, private advocacy groups, and just about anybody else who dares to oppose the Kremlin.
"Our law enforcement finally realized that computers are very important tools for their opponents, and they have decided to take away these tools by doing something close to the West’s agenda," said Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama research institute in Moscow. "I suppose you could say it’s very clever."
With reports that losses due to piracy were an estimated $2 billion USD last year in Russia the effort seems long overdue, but considering the Kremlin has already been pursuing a pattern of squashing political dissent in that country the timing seems more than coincidental.
Law enforcement officials in at least 5 Russian cities have used the fight against software piracy to seize computers critical to opposition groups and the few remaining independent media outlets, thereby making communication and news publishing efforts difficult if not impossible.
With the authorities failing to challenge mega piracy hubs located in defense facilities and other govt agencies, those caught up in the crackdown are rightly calling foul.
"This is not a campaign against piracy, it’s a campaign against dissent," said Vitaly Yaroshevsky, a deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, who is in charge of the newspaper’s regional editions. "The authorities want to destroy an opposition newspaper. It doesn’t matter if we send more computers to Samara. It doesn’t matter if we show we bought computers legally. It will change nothing." The paper says it believes its software is legal.
Another tactic being used is to time a computer seizure for "expert evaluation" to occur just before an election or protest march, which immediately throws their organization into disarray and leaves them scrambling for handwritten backups if any at all exist.
"They have suddenly decided it’s a great tactic," said Pavel Chikov, head of Agora, a coalition of Russian private groups. "They can stop all the activities of a group at a key moment, before a march or during the election period."
Considering that the PC has become such a vital tool for communication, data storage, and organizational management, using software piracy as a pretext to get their hands on such critical item is pretty ingenious. I only hope that it gives software developers a moment for pause and make them reconsider what their lobbying of the Russian govt has really gotten them in the end.
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They could be giving the U.S. ideas.