Friday, August 05, 2005

Yushchenko Registers Revolution Symbols

This is the kind of thing that is bound to come up in the scramble for information on Jr. that the press conference touched off--Yushchenko Registers Revolution Symbols.

My response to this new information is that those rights may be worth a small fortune in the US but they aren't worth much in a country where the latest Hollywood film is available for about 3 bucks. (You may have to put up with the occasional dipping of the camera or one or two moving silhouettes--like the old Warner Brothers cartoons. And the picture can be kind of grainy. But if you want better quality for that movie, just wait a couple of weeks.) The point is that intellectual property rights here are virtually non-existent. They may have registered the rights with Yuschenko's son but it will be a tough thing to get any value from them because there is really no serious enforcement going on for any such rights now anyway.

There were a number of musicians that became famous during the Orange Revolution. Grynjolly is the most conspicuous of the bunch. But I think you will find they did not make any money on the song they wrote even though just about everybody has a recording of it. The reason? Pirate copies out there. People around here may think that intellectual property rights are all for those rich Americans but the creative industry here suffers for the lack of enforcement of those same rights too.

So it might look suspicious that Yuschenko Jr. got the rights but in Ukraine they don't mean much of anything. You might say they are not really worth the paper they're printed on.

By the way, it is not as if there isn't a way to protect intellectual property rights. There is. It just takes a bit more than looking at it as a legal problem. And these options are not open to Yuschenko's son at this point.

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