War Against Pirates Declared

Deputy Head of the Intellectual Property State Department Valentyn Chebotariov has announced that in the next few weeks the creation of an Association of Intellectual Property will be completed, due to which “it will become possible to switch the accent of protection from Kyiv to the regions,” reports Interfax Ukraine. In Mr. Chebotariov’s opinion, creating this association will make it possible to determine the amount of copyright infringement in Ukraine. He noted that the Ukrainian organization had not carried out such research before, and the data of foreign researches are slightly exaggerated. In his approximation, the level of sales of unlicensed records and CDs in Ukraine reaches 80%. Let us recall that according to the International Federation of the Phonogram Industry Ukraine is a leader in Europe with a piracy level of about 95% of market volume. According to data of the Business Software Alliance, Ukraine is in the top ten of the countries producing pirate software with piracy level of 89%.

Meanwhile, Director of the Ukrainian Agency for Copyright and Related Rights Serhiy Bondarenko announced the creation of a television and radio broadcast monitoring system to control observance of the law On Copyright and Related Rights by Ukrainian broadcasters. According to him, this system will be introduced in Kyiv in the immediate future, and then in all Ukraine’s regions. Mr. Bondarenko stressed that his agency “carries out the collective administration of over 60,000 Ukrainian and tens of thousands foreign authors. However, none of the television companies broadcasting on Ukraine’s territory has so far signed a contract with the agency on paying royalties.”