Russian legislators have developed a plan to retaliate against the latest U.S. sanctions: transform Russia into a pirate state.
Draft legislation submitted to the State Duma on Friday would give the government the authority to waive copyright restrictions on select foreign products, “allowing” Russian enterprises to produce those goods without the consent of their patent holders abroad.
“The exhaustion of exclusive rights,” lawmakers say, could be used against the U.S. and other hostile states, according to Meduza.
“In other words, we’ll gut-punch the Americans, since it’s precisely intellectual property that is responsible for all their success and, above all, the domination of the Anglo-Saxon and Western world. And we’d strike a blow against this right,” explained Mikhail Emelyanov, the deputy chairman of the Duma’s Legislation Committee.
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As UNIAN reported earlier, Russia set up an operational group in the Azov-Black Sea Territorial Administration of the Russian Federal Agency for Fisheries to tackle the alleged "Ukrainian piracy," following the Kremlin's claims that Ukraine unlawfully seized a Crimea-based Russian-flagged fishing vessel, which Kyiv says has violated a number of Ukrainian laws, including on the illegal crossing of Ukraine's border.