Russian Patents Blog

IndustryWeek publishes detailed article on IP (Intellectual Property) theft issues, and makes it the cover story.

Foreign governments play a key role in fighting IP theft, but unfortunately, there is a wide variance in how countries are attacking the problems of counterfeiting and IP theft, according to a 30-nation study by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). The top performing countries are: U.S., UK, Germany and France. Also among the best performers, in descending order: Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia.

Of course, to be any good, a decent article on IP theft must mentioned the main “bad guys” in the field –

At the other end of the spectrum, responders named China and Russia, respectively, as the two worst performing countries, followed by India, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Pakistan, Turkey and Ukraine.

“Study may seem to suggest that IP theft and counterfeiting is a well recognized problem, but in reality many firms are just coming to terms with it, says Brian Monks, vice president of anti-counterfeiting operations at safety certification organization Underwriters Laboratories (UL). And even if an organization hasn’t been victimized yet, chances are good it soon will be, he warns. Brand volume and good margins increase the risk.”

Author of the article is quite good at describing IP theft/counterfeiting as a combination of challenges – read entire article here.

But as it turns out, Russian counterfeiters may cause not only headaches to western companies – Slashdot writes:

“Author Paulo ‘Pirate’ Coelho leapt out of obscurity and onto the
best-seller list by giving away his books on the Net. The best-selling
author of ‘The Alchemist’ will even help you pirate his books via his
blog.

His publishers were not pleased, but then his books went from
selling 1,000 copies to 100,000 and then over a million. He gives special
credit to pirate translators who are making his work accessible to a
wider audience and convincing more people to read his book.”

In particular, Coelho denotes works of Russian pirates – he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more.

Coelho seems to be pretty enthusiastic about – he’s been actively posting to his blog, latest post is dated jan 23 and he announces what “I added more books in 7 different languages“.

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The new Russian ambassador to NATO has raised the issue of military patent infringement and promised to look into the production of the famous ‘Kalashnikov’ brand of automatic weapons by NATO countries.

“As I was preparing to take up my new post, I was astonished at the disrespect for proprietary rights in the field of armaments,” Dmitry Rogozin told a news conference on Thursday.

“Copyright law should not be only confined to art and culture, but must also cover armaments,” he said.

He said many countries, including some NATO and European Union members, produced Kalashnikov weapons. “We will find out on what licenses and agreements the production and supply of our automatic weapons is based and how much money the Russian Federation has lost,” he added.

He said the arms plant Arsenal in Bulgaria had sold 10,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov automatic rifles to Turkmenistan in 1994 and 60,000 in 2005, as well as 40,000 to Iraq in 2003. The plant also supplied arms to Georgia, Afghanistan, Indonesia and United Arab Emirates under multimillion-dollar contracts, the official added.

Rogozin said the plant’s branch in the U.S. state of Nevada had also sold 10,000 Kalashnikov-based semi-automatic weapons and that a Polish foreign trade association had sold 10,000 Kalashnikov weapons to Iraq.

“The same concerns Hungary, Romania and others,” he said pointing that “these are respected countries, member states of NATO and the European Union.”

Rogozin said the issue would see “serious discussions” if it was established that these countries had produced the weapons illegally and without due payments to Russia.

Rogozin, who starts work at NATO’s HQ in Brussels on January 28, stressed that there were norms and restrictions to be complied with by all NATO and EU countries.

A former chairman of the lower house committee for foreign affairs, Rogozin was earlier considered a pro-Kremlin politician and held the post of presidential envoy to the Kaliningrad Region, a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania. He also formerly led the nationalist bloc Rodina (Motherland).

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While googling today on prior art matters, I happened across Patent Baristas blog.

Of particular interest to me was recent post on regard of (US) Patent reform – Patent Reform: What Does First-To-File Mean To Me? – Stephen Albainy-Jenei quite nicely explained First-To-File vs First-to-Invent (and variation first-inventor-to-file) issues, so I do understand much better matters re prior art importance:

The second difference involves prior art. … In the first-to-file system, prior art includes all art that exists prior to the filing date – again, an objective inquiry. In contrast, in a first-to-invent system, prior art is measured from the more amorphous date of invention.

Also of importance to me was clarification what “Prior art also will no longer have any geographic limitations; thus in section 102 the “in this country” limitation as applied to “public use” and “on sale” is removed, and the phrase “available to the public” is added to clarify the broad scope of relevant prior art, as well as to emphasize the fact that it must be publicly available.”

Conclusion: I expect more inquiries for Russian prior art search and for Russian scientific and medical literature search and delivery pouring in this year.

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