Russia Claims IP Rights In Manufacture of AK-47 502
Daniel Dvorkin writes "In the latest example of over-the-top intellectual property demands, Russia wants licensing fees for the production of AK-47s. According to first deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov, the unlicensed production of Kalashnikovs (which have been around in very nearly their current form for 60 years) in ex-Soviet Bloc countries is 'intellectual piracy.' A giant but declining power starts demanding royalties on commonly used methods and materials that are widely understood, well known, and by any reasonable standard have long been in the public domain — does this sound familiar?" Wikipedia notes that the Izhevsk Machine Tool Factory in Russia obtained a patent on the manufacture of the AK-47 in 1999.
Polonium patent? (Score:0, Insightful)
Sounds fair to me (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what we get for playing IP games and "owning" ideas.
Russia? No, the company. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:4, Insightful)
Prior art, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
During the Cold War, at least a dozen Warsaw Pact and non-aligned countries produced copies and variants of the AK47, with the Soviet Union's tacit, if not overt, blessing. Even now, new AKs are being built by blacksmiths in Pakistan and US gunsmiths (the latter do this to comply with ATF regulations that prohibit import of receivers and assembled rifles).
Now that the Cold War is over, Russia wants to get paid? I'd think that with all their oil and gas income, licensing fees would be a pittence by comparison.
k.
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Controlling the Russian Beast (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't sound non-Western to me. I wish it did, but wishes don't make truth.
Fantasies about intellectual property (Score:3, Insightful)
Why manufacture AK-47s when they could buy them by the thousands in the open market, from Soviet factories, or from their clients around the world at pennies on the dollar?
The only people the Russians are going after right now are companies that, when they went into production of the rifle, were ORDERED to make them - not exactly a good argument for intellectual property rights, or any property rights at all.
And, as I pointed out below, any patent that might have been possible would have expired about 40 years back.
The whole "1999 Russian patent claim" thing comes from one unsourced comment in one Wikipedia article, anyway - I have to wonder about the actual truth of the claim in the first place.
From the posts here, it seems we have two schools: the people who think it's a bogus claim, and the ones who are still Really Pissed about allofMP3.com having problems.
Re:Controlling the Russian Beast (Score:2, Insightful)
Claiming property rights over stuff 60 years old, police-sanctioned beating of protestors, weapons testings in violation of treaties, secretly attacking other countries, and full of homophobes and racists....
I'm confused. Why are they non-Western again?
Re:Champagne (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Are you serious? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fantasies about intellectual property (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Controlling the Russian Beast (Score:3, Insightful)
That reminds me... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Controlling the Russian Beast (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What do you want them to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
LADA and WILLYS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds fair to me (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, Russia is far from known for protecting "intellectual property". Quite the opposite indeed. This is hypocritical, to say the least.
Re:The point of invention monopoly (Score:2, Insightful)
No, they needed patronage. Without patronage they would not have had the money/lifestyle necessary to create great art. And because patronage is scarce, art from their period was scarce as well -- nothing like the explosion of books, music and movies of all tastes (not just highbrow) we've seen in the 20th century.
> Would Einstien have invented more if he had patented his ideas for 20 years?
No, because scientific theories cannot be patented -- in his time or ours. Also, he really didn't invent much.
> Have patent laws sped up the development of the automobile?
They have made automobiles significantly better. Amidst all the bitching about Detroit, the Japanese came in with improved factory processes (many of which they were able to patent) to make cars cheaper and more reliable. Anyone used to 50s automobiles would be astonished at the safety of a modern car-- and this is reflected in national and international automobile accident stats.
> What would the world look like if there are no open standards and no public domain?
There is a case for open standards and the public domain (btw, many open standards are based on patented technology. Example: the CD. They're just licensed on a RAND basis.) However those are not adequate cause for the destruction of all intellectual property rights.
Re:Controlling the Westernised Russian Beast (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not think that we should throw away all of these refinements and go back to "pure" democracy, unless we want to relive two centuries of bloody revolutions and poorly constructed political systems. (In a pure democracy, the majority could actually vote to have the minority executed en masse - and chances are from time to time they would.)
Re:Expired? (Score:2, Insightful)
Direct participatory democracy has a scaling problem, so unless you're in Switzerland, it's not very useful. I agree that representatives are also dickwads, which is why we need term limits on legislators, just like we have a 2-term limit on the President. It would also have the side effect that professionals (engineers, scientists) would be more inclined (than lawyers) to seek public office.
We could have this if people's ideas about politics and ethics weren't warped by capital and the church. What if scientists had equal access to the media and school system as religious people do? What if parents had no right to force their children to go to church? What if advertising became useless because consumers would research products based on independent reports instead of listening to the marketing propaganda? What if bosses became useless because companies would be directly managed through democratic unions. Why not vote on hiring and firing and other important workplace decisions?
> What if parents had no right to force their children to go to church?
If you're saying that the state should micro-manage how parents rear their kids, sorry, I don't agree. I'm not religious, but if anyone wants to raise their kids to be religious, so be it. It's their kids, after all -- not yours.
> What if bosses became useless because companies would be directly managed through democratic unions.
They already exist. They're called co-operatives [wikipedia.org]. They have scaling issues. And yes, they have bosses. Go study organization theory to find out why. Btw, it could be argued that a public company where workers own signficant stock is a form of a democratically-owned company. I think SAS Software is an example (but I could be wrong). Again, there are scaling issues and the pesky issue of how you can equitably divide up a company.
> Why not vote on hiring and firing and other important workplace decisions?
Because that works so well on _American Idol_. The talent really floats to the top. Not.
> You're previous posts indicated that you would defend dictatorships.
I think you just saw in them what you wanted to see. My posts are on the record and I think any clear-headed individual can decide for himself or herself if I was 'defending dictatorships'. Look inside you and ask where the violence comes from.
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:3, Insightful)
And I suspect she might be correct about other things she said: American foreign policy towards foreigners abroad is very similar to Russian foreign policy.
Re:Controlling the Russian Beast (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod parent up as insightful. Buddy of mine had a grad school prof who was a Russian expert that was called in by Clinton. Told Bubba that he should support Democracy and not Yeltsin.
Ol' Bubba loved dealing with a drunk Yeltsin too much to do the noble thing and...we have reaped what he sowed.
I watched it happen and thought it was a bad idea to support Yeltsin, but Clinton felt he was getting a patsy, thinking short term and not about the future or the damage his actions might have on others.
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:4, Insightful)
When was direct democracy tried? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:5, Insightful)
In my defense, I was remembering a conversation eight years past with a neighbor fifty years my senior. And hosing it. That or Sully hosed it in the first place, I'm not sure.
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:1, Insightful)
What's scary, exactly, about a system which has as its sole function the reduction in effectiveness of the use of unmanned offensive weapons of mass destruction? The only Russian "right" threatened by missile defenses is the "right" to engage in nuclear blackmail.
I understand why the Russians object; Chechnya has proven their conventional military incapacity, so the only credible asset they have for intimidating other countries is their nuclear arsenal. Of course Russia doesn't like it.
What I fail to see is why anybody who isn't Russian thinks it's scary to end a situation where the people of Warsaw or Dublin live only as long as Russia's government unilaterally chooses to let them live. Are they idiots, or just utterly without morality?
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:3, Insightful)
New missile tests - While here in the US we have been doing missile interceptor tests, yep, missiles of our own, that we intend to install in Poland. We have also been testing obscenely large conventional bombs and not 100 miles from where I live we have delivery systems capable of stealthily dropping them anywhere in the world. Keep in mind that we, the US, shortly after 9/11 withdrew from the ABM treaty after 30 years. It does concern me that they feel the need to test new ICBMs, but I see it as a diplomatic problem that is being complicated by rhetoric from the current administration in Washington.
alleged poisonings - Alleged. It was also alleged that Saddam had WMD.
building reactors for Iran - several countries export reactors. Iran just happens to be a country that we don't have diplomatic relations with and they say bad things about us. If we still had the relationship with them that we had 30 years ago, we'd be the ones building the reactors. I would rather someone built them reactors and supplied them with fuel than have them continue with their own nuclear processing programs.
suppression of political opposition - because our news isn't processed. But really, is it any of our business? I don't remember hearing anyone ask for our opinion of their political processes.
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:3, Insightful)
Their pistol, the 9x18 Makarov, uses a slightly oversize 9.2mm diameter bullet. NATO forces use the 9x19 cartridge with a standard 9.0mm diameter bullet.
The point is not so the Russians could use NATO ammo, they can't (it would blow up in your face if you tried). They did it so that NATO forces couldn't use Russian ammo (the 9x18 cartridge would work in a 9x19 gun, if the bullet was only 9.0mm).
Re:Sounds fair to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Central Romania feels very energy-poor, but that's an infrastructure rather than an availability issue; it's a big place, and not a wealthy one, and they haven't yet got round to putting in the wires and the pipes universally.
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:3, Insightful)
Your post was quite insightful until this point, but you just lost me here. Yes, it is our business (and I'm saying that as someone who's neither from the USA nor from Russia). It's not necessarily something we - as non-Russians - can do much about, but declaring it as internal Russian affairs that "we" are not allowed to have an opinion on and to say that - in essence - there's not even anything wrong with it (I mean, come on - "political processes" has to be one of the worst euphemisms I've heard today) shows an attitude that's not just naive but also worrying.
Re:Pay or Die! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what subcontractors are for.
The argument that Halliburton was the only company big enough for the job is so completely bogus, it's laughable. That's the ignorant Sunday afternoon talkshow talking point.
The Pentagon could have farmed it out to a number of smaller contractors, with anyone else being a primary, and the rest a sub, or they could have split it up to a smaller number of contracts with multiple primaries. This no-bid contract was pure war-profiteering. Nothing more. The proof is in the result. The amount of fraud and waste in this deal is the worst in history. And that was determined under a regime of very unusually relaxed bookkeeping rules that Congressional Republicans pushed strongly for.