Novaya Gazeta closed: ‘piracy’ charge
p2pnet news | Freedom:- The front page picture of today’s online Novaya Gazeta is, appropriately, of a caged man.
It’s appropriate because the newspaper, described in a Washington Post story as one of the last bastions of critical journalism in Russia, was forced to halt publication of its Samara edition in the south because a criminal case has been lodged against its editor.
His alleged crime?
Using unlicensed software.
But, “This is not a campaign against piracy, it’s a campaign against dissent,” the story has Vitaly Yaroshevsky, a deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, who’s in charge of the newspaper’s regional editions, saying.
“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.”
Nor is Novaya Gazeta alone, the Washington Post states.
“In the past 10 months, police in at least five Russian cities have raided the offices of media outlets, political parties and private advocacy groups and seized computers allegedly containing illegal software, paralyzing the work of the organizations,” it says, going on:
Most of the Russian groups targeted by the authorities deny buying counterfeit software or say they used it only unwittingly. They charge that with authorities doing little to challenge the rampant piracy in Russia, including illicit production of disks in defense facilities and other agencies, the raids on their own offices amount to selective enforcement of the law.
Most of the unlicensed software ‘criminals’ appear to be connected to the opposition coalition called Other Russia, led by chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, a “fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin,” says the story, adding:
The offices of the Samara Novaya Gazeta, a weekly, were first raided by Interior Ministry investigators before Kasparov’s rally in May. Police seized financial documents, as well as computers. The paper was one of the few media outlets that had planned to cover the march, according to its editor in chief in Samara, Sergey Kurt-Adzhiyev. Moreover, the editor said, his daughter, Anastasia, 21, was one of the local organizers of the march.
Meanwhile, “according to Tatyana Lokshina, head of Demos, a Moscow-based human rights group, activist groups across the country are hastily checking the legality of their software.”
Also See:
Washington Post – Russia Casts A Selective Net in Piracy Crackdown, November 14, 2007
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November 14th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
This is what you call freedom of expression!