In a strange turn of events, the government of Belarus has signed into law a regulation that would make it legal for any business or individual to pirate movies, music, games, and software from other countries.
2023 is already shaping up to be a year of unusual headlines but this one wasn’t on my bingo card of predictions. According to Deadline, anyone in Belarus can use the intellectual property of “unfriendly foreign nations” without payment or clearance to those who own the legal rights.
Belarus is a small eastern European nation with a population approximately equal to London. Belarus was a founding member of the former Soviet Union and is a current ally of Russia. The country has also been on the negative end of sanctions due to election issues that many western nations have deemed unacceptable, calling the elections “fraudulent.”
Because of this, most nations could be considered “unfriendly” to Belarus, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union at large. What’s more, the language of the law states that if any company or nation is “unfriendly” to a Belarusan organization, business, or individual then they seems to be fair game for use without payment to the rights holder.
BELARUS LEGALIZES PIRACY FROM “UNFRIENDLY” COUNTRIES ***
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) January 10, 2023
If Belarus is an ally of Russia and stands with Russia against the Ukraine, this would open up a large part of the western world to intellectual property exposure in Belarus. To put a finer point on it, how many organizations or countries do you know of that have vocalized support for Volodymyr Zelensky, the country of Ukraine, or spoken out against Russia? How many organizations do you see flying a Ukrainian flag or simply putting a Ukrainian flag emoji in their social media bio?
There is a catch for those in Belarus, of course. In order to use unlicensed or pirated content, people in Belarus must make a payment to the Belarusan patent authority where the payment will be held in escrow for up to three years. If the payment is not collected by the rights holder, after three years the money will be forfeited to the Belarusan government. It is unclear who will determine the fair market value of the intellectual property in question.
It is also not yet clear how the government will enforce payments to Belarus’s National Patent Authority, but internet access in Belarus is through a state-run service provider, meaning that they have complete control. Any physical good must simply be labelled “essential for the domestic market” in order to comply with the law.
In the past, the United States government has had to intervene in matters of international intellectual property theft in order to effect any change. George W. Bush had to comment on the Russian music piracy site AllofMP3.com publicly before the Russian government intervened and eventually halted sales. In times of geopolitical unrest, the path even less clear. Belarus is a member of the United Nations, so there might be recourse from that avenue, but it seems unlikely to be a pressing issue while there is war in the Ukraine.
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