In a sophisticated look at the complex interplay between law, piracy, and the Internet in developing countries like Russia and China, Russia Priofile.org asks what is the role of copyright law in Russia’s future.
One can see numerous similarities between Russia and China (as well as many other Asian countries) with regard to the causes and complexities surrounding the piracy phenomenon. Like China, Russia has up-to-date laws in place, but there is a huge disparity between the laws on the books and the realities on the ground. The scale of the problem and domestic political complexities mean that any amount of browbeating by the US will yield little in the way of effective piracy enforcement. These countries need innovative solutions that compensate creators (thereby incentivizing and enabling creation) and simultaneously ensure that the public is able to enjoy widespread access to the creations.
Alexander Sergeyev, a commentator on science and technology for Radio Liberty, is one of the most vocal anti-copyright advocates in Russia. The starting point for his assessment is the sheer volume of copyright infringement in Russia, which cannot be simply reversed by decrees from above; instead, the international legal doctrine needs to be revised and coordinated better with the rise of challenging new technologies. He also argues that widespread piracy is what inadvertently spawned a home-grown computer and software industry throughout the 1990s.
Sergeyev likens the internet to samizdat, or self-publishing, which thrived in the Soviet Union. It is a decentralized system which treats outside regulatory mechanisms as near-totalitarian infringement on intellectual freedom and creativity. “The copyright lobby is mostly concerned with the bottom line for corporations which have a huge stake in the system,” Sergeyev said. “The government needs to introduce better financing mechanisms to make creative pursuits commercially viable and compensate for the shortcomings of market mechanisms. The idea is to stimulate private initiative while serving the public interest and fostering cultural diversity.”
One interesting statistic from the article: in Moscow’s 812 outlets where pirated software is sold, profits have been cut in half in 2005 due to file sharing and other online transactions involving pirated goods. This is not surprising, and provides more statistical support for what logic and experience suggests: online file sharing decreases the market for physical piracy. Clearly, the future of the “piracy” phenomenon–for better or worse–is online. Such statistics provide support for the contention that instituting a governmentally administered alternative compensation system in countries like China or Russia–and thus facilitating even more file sharing online–would very likely lead to a significant reduction in the manufacture and sales of physical pirate goods, decreasing piracy overall. An alternative compensation system would be one type of innovative solution for these countries, along the lines I discussed above.
In the first-ever