The judgment of the Taganskiy district court of Moscow has jeopardized millions of users of the licensed software, including installed on the computer company Apple.
As writes “Rosbalt”, in June 2016, the Tagansky district court of Moscow issued a guilty verdict against a former system administrator Alexey Starikov, and sentenced him to one year imprisonment, suspended for using malware is obviously intended for unauthorized copying. We are talking about programs Lan Agent Standard Security Curator and the Time Machine. The latter is the built-in functions on all computers running the operating system macOS.
According to the lawyer condemned Dmitry Sokolov, the sentence of Tagansky court is illegal because the court recognized the malware which is not. All three programs eligible were and are in public circulation and available for sale on the territory of Russia. At sentencing, the court mistakenly interpreted the evaluation criteria of harmfulness, despite the protection the experts of the laboratory accredited by the Federal service for technical and export control, determining, Time Machine, Lan Security Standard Agent and Curator are not malicious and certainly not meant for unauthorized actions specified in part 1 of article 273 of the criminal code.
According to the Starikov defence, the prosecution did not provide any evidence on the merits of his guilt, namely that the malicious function was incorporated in a technical device programs when they are created, as well as evidence of direct intent to use malware. The verdict has not yet entered into force. Finally the situation will be resolved after the Moscow city court will consider the appeal.
As suggested by the lawyer of the convicted person, if an existing sentence is confirmed by a higher court, it will affect the interests of producers, who will be able to seek action against Russia to the court and demand compensation for financial losses and damage to reputation.
