Moscow. (Vasily Zubkov, RIA Novosti economic analyst).
The Federal Service for Intellectual Property, Patents and Trade Marks has set up a public consultative council. Its director Boris Simonov says: "We want to solve problems of protecting intellectual property by drawing on the opinion of a wide number of specialists and basing ourselves on experts." One of them, Alexei Popovichev, of the Rossbrend committee, believes that it is the council that is obliged to take an immediate part in drafting a decision to destroy counterfeit products before a court ruling, since these products are stored at the expense of the rights proprietor.
Also, owners of trademarks are insisting on the confiscation of equipment, which is used to turn out faked products so that in the future it should not be utilised for similar ends. In this connection, brand holders need a presence in the Consultative Council and help from state bodies.
Igor Bokovtsev, president of the Disk Alians association of a non-commercial partnership of Russian optical carriers, also considers it advisable to be represented on the Council. The eleven factories, integrated in the alliance, last year jointly produced about 60 million CDs for the market. Since optical carrier producers are one of the noticeable players on the Russian market of intellectual property, they are concerned at the problem of protecting their economic interests and those of strategic clients - rights proprietors, believes Bokovtsev.
In his view, the low price of imported old equipment for making compact disks contributes to the emergence of small companies that flood the market with counterfeit products. This weakens the positions of large legal customers. It is only together that producers and officials can solve this problem, the Disk Alians president is convinced.
Perhaps the Consultative Council, while concerning itself with updating the legislative base and measures to deal with producers of fake products, will draw the attention of rights proprietors to the need to look for additional marketing solutions to squeeze counterfeit products from the Russian market, thinks Andrei Brants, commercial director of the Urals electronic plant (UED-CD, Yekaterinburg - a new brand Laser Craft), the biggest in the industry, producing 4 million CDs a month.
