Air pirates – in Uzhgorod Airport, pirates were caught

The city airport shall pay "Microsoft" Corporation 66,000 USD as a compensation for copyright infringement in the form of using unlicensed software.

The Commercial Court ordered "Uzhgorod International Airport" to pay USD 66,000 as a compensation to Microsoft Corporation for using illegal software, informed the press service of the company.

During the trial, which lasted more than a year, the court found out that Uzhgorod airport used six computers with illegal software for administrative purposes, as well as for selling tickets to passengers. This fact was discovered as a result of police inspection carried out by the officers of the Transcarpathian Regional Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Despite the fact that the investigation in the criminal case, initiated on the basis of this inspection, was subsequently suspended because they failed to establish who exactly installed pirated software on the computers of the enterprise, it did not prevent the copyright holder to take legal action in the Commercial Court against the enterprise as a legal person.

The court also determined that each unlicensed copy of Microsoft software products, installed on airport computers, shall be regarded as a separate fact of copyright infringement, and the defendant shall pay compensation for each one of them. Its minimum amount according to the law constitutes 10 minimum wages, which is about 10 thousand hryvnias.

The use of pirated software in Ukraine in 2011 was 84%, which is 2% lower than in 2010. The commercial value of unlicensed software, installed on personal computers in Ukraine in 2011 amounted to 647 million dollars.These are the data of the 2011 Global Software Piracy Study, conducted worldwide by the Association of Software Developers (BSA).