| Moscow authorities want to make a business out of intellectual property Moscow government officials suddenly remembered the problem of the efficiency of city spending on scientific development. Bearing in mind that intellectual property objects (various inventions, trademarks, etc.) are in the future a bottomless source of replenishment of the city budget, the government at a meeting on Tuesday adopted the “Concept of involving intellectual property objects in economic circulation.” Independent experts consider the document “crude”.
The sphere of intellectual property rights in Moscow is in terrible disarray (in fairness, it should be noted that this is happening not only in the capital, but throughout Russia). For example, some time ago, the companies Audi and Samsung, having entered the Russian market, were forced to buy out their own trademarks registered by energetic Russian entrepreneurs. As Dmitry Rototaev, vice-president of AFK Sistema, calculated, in total, businessmen seeking registration earned about $1 million from this operation.
The intellectual property market is homeless, Moscow officials stated following a heated discussion. In the early 90s, as Deputy Mayor Valery Shantsev put it, domestic scientific achievements were bought up by “foreigners at the price of an hourly wage for a black man to work in America.” Today the situation has not changed, and losses from mismanagement are multiplying every year. Various sources estimate them from 200 thousand to 2 billion dollars.
According to the document “adopted as a basis” at the government meeting, it is planned to create a special unit in the department of science and industrial policy of the Moscow government, which, in particular, will take inventory of the achievements of the capital’s institutes and industrial enterprises, in the development of which city money was invested. This work should be done in the first quarter of next year.
There is no consistency in working with the intellectual property of the city government. An example of this is the activities of the Moscow State Joint Stock Company, which in theory was supposed to be involved in the creation of intellectual property in the field of tourism: programs of excursion routes, the image of Moscow as a world tourist center. “The tens of millions of dollars invested in GAO Moscow were wasted, this is obvious,” says Moscow City Duma deputy Dmitry Kataev. In his opinion, there are many such examples. This happens due to the failure to comply with the law “On City Orders,” according to which the distribution of city funds should be on a competitive basis, which is not observed. City officials have expressed their intention to reconsider the structure of financing their orders, abandoning low-profit projects in favor of potentially profitable ones.
But the culmination of the discussion of intellectual property problems at a government meeting was the moment when it became clear that the involvement of intellectual property objects in economic circulation had already occurred. One of the government departments - the Moscow Committee on Science and Technology (for some reason existing in the form of an OJSC) - has been organizing this process and, accordingly, collecting income from it since 1993. Vladislav DOLGOV |
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