Spurred by its desire to join the WTO, the government is cracking down on copyright thieves with new laws and enforcement actions. Unlike past Potemkin-village initiatives, this one seems to be for real.
Just one in six DVDs sold in Russia is a legal copy, according to Russia’s Antipiracy Organization. And 83 percent of software was counterfeit in 2006, down 4 percent from 2005, according to the U.S.-based Intellectual Property Alliance. IPA’s report ranked Russia as the world’s second biggest counterfeiter after China, saying Russian pirates have caused U.S. companies $1.43 billion in lost sales. Russian music download sites, such as AllofMP3, have long angered the western music industry.
In recent months, Vedomosti reported, police raided many insurance and travel companies to check for pirated software, with raids of other types of businesses in the offing. Guilty businesses have been charged with copyright infringement and their computers – often containing vital operational information – have been confiscated as evidence.
In the 1990s, when Russians were living on a shoestring, few could afford to pay for legal software or music CDs. What is more, few cared about copyright laws: why pay several times more if there was no penalty for cheating? And, after all, everyone was stealing.
Enter the scapegoat. In January, Alexander Ponosov, a school principal in a small town in Perm region, was put on trial for copyright violations after purchasing school computers that contained unlicensed Microsoft software. Ponosov said he did not know that the computers had preinstalled counterfeit software.
Ponosov’s case became widely publicized after Mikhail Gorbachev wrote to Bill Gates, asking Microsoft to drop charges against Ponosov. Microsoft replied that it had nothing to do with the lawsuit, and that prosecutors were acting on their own initiative. The local court soon dropped all charges against Ponosov, deeming the case insignificant. But then, on March 27, the Perm Regional Court overturned the lower court’s ruling, so Ponosov will face a second trial.
Alarmed by the Ponosov case, Russian schools and companies are rushing to purchase software licenses. Moscow State University promised it would get rid of all counterfeit software by March 31. MSU and other schools and universities were spurred to audit their systems after the Ministry of Education sent out a letter in early March highlighting the Ponosov case and urging local schools to check their software.
As a result, sales at Microsoft and other software companies are surging, causing temporary shortages of Windows Vista and other software, Vedomosti said. Even before the crackdown, Microsoft Russia sales grew 72 percent in 2006, leading the company to start producing Windows and Microsoft Office software in Yaroslavl.
Meanwhile, the government has banned street sales of CDs and DVDs. Several months prior, counterfeit software began to disappear from stores. The changes are helped by the fact that Russians, now considerably better off than a decade ago, can more easily afford to pay for the real thing.
Previous Russian efforts to muscle out pirated media have had little effect. A 2002 effort failed, because it was impossible “to assign a policemen to watch every street vendor, and then another policeman to watch the first one,” as then prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov said.
With both the government and citizens taking things more seriously this time, Copyright Crackdown 2007 appears to be more than just a pirated copy of the limpid 2002 version.
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