Former Judge Accuses Russia's IP Court Of Using Unlicensed Software

from the pot-meet-kettle dept

There are some ongoing jokes of a kind that cynics like myself believe have more than a grain of truth to them. They go something like "The moment you have a person or group sanctimoniously come out violently against [X], you can pretty much set your watch to the eventuality that that same person or group will be found to have committed [X] themselves." This works in a myriad of arenas, from "family first" politicians getting caught up in affairs, to "children first" people and groups found to have abused children, up to and including matters of intellectual property. The examples of those in favor of draconian IP enforcement being found to have violated IP themselves are so legion that this entire sentence could have been constructed of nothing but hyperlinks to those past stories.

And now, it seems, we may be able to add Russia's Intellectual Property Rights Court to the list. A former judge on that court has filed a lawsuit against the court itself accusing it of wanton use of unlicensed Microsoft software.

Paragon is representing Alexander Shmuratov, who is a former Assistant Judge at the Court for Intellectual Property Rights. Shmuratov worked at the Court for several years and claims that the computers there were being operated with expired licenses. Shmuratov himself told Kommersant that he “saw the notice of an activation failure every day when using MS Office products” in intellectual property court.

Now, it will be easy for some to simply hand-wave this away. Copyright infringement of American products in Russia is something of a national pastime, after all. And with all of the current rhetoric in the public about Russia, much of it deserved, it would be all too easy to shrug this off as a bad actor state doing bad actor things. The Russian government itself is attempting to combat the accusation by discrediting Shmuratov, who it says was fired for providing false income information as a matter of his employment. Making this all the more strange is how the Russian government has conspired with Microsoft in the past to use copyright to intimidate critics of the government.

What none of that changes is that the IP court in a major country may very well have been pirating software as it doled out punishments for the IP infringements of others. If true, that's about as purely laid bare the hypocrisy of IP maximilists as could be had. All kinds of IP infringement happen every day, and in all kinds of ways. The rules for patent, copyright, and trademark law are as convoluted as they are draconian, whereas the simple economics of digital goods practically begs for the kind of use and copying that would be called infringement. If the court overseeing Russia's IP court cases can't get this right, why should it be expected that anyone else can?

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: alexander shmuratov, copyright, court for intellectual property rights, infringement, russia, software