Form: Quote Commentary

THE END OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

—““In other words, we’ll gut-punch the Americans, since it’s precisely intellectual property that is responsible for all their success and, above all, the domination of the Anglo-Saxon and Western world. And we’d strike a blow against this right,” explained Mikhail Emelyanov, the deputy chairman of the Duma’s Legislation Committee.”—

Duma: Russia must become a pirate state: Russian lawmakers mull stealing American intellectual property as response to U.S. sanctions

20:30, 13 April 2018, Reuters

Russian legislators have developed a plan to retaliate against the latest U.S. sanctions: transform Russia into a pirate state.

Draft legislation submitted to the State Duma on Friday would give the government the authority to waive copyright restrictions on select foreign products, “allowing” Russian enterprises to produce those goods without the consent of their patent holders abroad. “The exhaustion of exclusive rights,” lawmakers say, could be used against the U.S. and other hostile states, according to Meduza.

“In other words, we’ll gut-punch the Americans, since it’s precisely intellectual property that is responsible for all their success and, above all, the domination of the Anglo-Saxon and Western world. And we’d strike a blow against this right,” explained Mikhail Emelyanov, the deputy chairman of the Duma’s Legislation Committee.

The same draft bill would also grant the government the right to issue more restrictions on American imports (such as alcohol, tobacco, medicines, and foods), limit the work of international rating agencies in Russia, ban certain foreign software, prohibit foreigners from participating in privatizations, suspend cooperation in various sectors (including nuclear power, aviation, and rocketry), and more.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Russia set up an operational group in the Azov-Black Sea Territorial Administration of the Russian Federal Agency for Fisheries to tackle the alleged “Ukrainian piracy,” following the Kremlin’s claims that Ukraine unlawfully seized a Crimea-based Russian-flagged fishing vessel, which Kyiv says has violated a number of Ukrainian laws, including on the illegal crossing of Ukraine’s border.