Meanwhile, the regime is angling to pocket the money owed to rightsholders:
Life just got a whole lot better in Belarus – apparently piracy is now legal as long as the media being stolen is from a country that has been mean to the Eastern European utopia.
Due to its support for Russia's war against Ukraine, Belarus is likewise subject to sanctions by the US, UK and EU governments. Much of the intellectual property that Belarus relies on comes from these spheres of influence and, as we have seen with the huge pullout of software companies from Russia, rightsholders are either no longer able or willing to supply or license their products in Belarus.
But such obstacles aren't a problem when you're [President] Lukashenko, who apparently opted simply to legalize access to pirated movies, music, TV shows and software in a new law [PDF] signed on January 3.
The legislation was spotted by pirate-friendly news outlet TorrentFreak, which reports on the peer-to-peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent (heavily used for piracy) and other copyright and IP issues. In their words:
The law 'On the limitation of exclusive rights to objects of intellectual property' targets rightsholders or collective management licensing organizations representing multiple rightsholders.
If these are from foreign countries "committing unfriendly actions" against Belarus, "which forbade or did not give consent" for lawfully published items of intellectual property to be used in Belarus, their exclusive rights relating to specified product classes will be limited.
[...] However, this being Belarus, it's not all swings and roundabouts for a hard-pressed population who might hope that torrenting HBO's House of the Dragon provides a moment of respite from the daily grind. No, the law says that if you use unlicensed content, you have to pay for it.
This is because Belarus has agreed to observe a number of IP treaties managed by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). So how do we get the money to rightsholders whose work has been pirated?
Here's the clever bit: to comply with WIPO rules, remuneration is to be paid to the National Patent Authority, through which rightsholders will be able to claim what's owed to them. So that's all above board – except that if the money isn't claimed after three years, it will be "transferred by the Patent Authority to the republican budget within three months," the law says.
Do you see where this is going? The National Patent Authority banks with Belarusbank, which is 99 percent owned by the government and both are subject to sanctions. Will rightsholders even be able to make a claim?
Not only that, but they won't be the ones setting the market price for pirated wares – that job falls to, you guessed it, the Belarusian government, and who knows on what basis they will make these decisions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kell on Thursday January 12, @07:54AM (6 children)
If I, a foreign national with respect to Belarus, legally purchase embargoed content in the jurisdiction of Belarus via an agent and then transfer it to my home computer domestically, what with it now being my own property, can domestic agencies or rights holders do anything about it?
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zocalo on Thursday January 12, @08:30AM
That's before you consider that Western intelligence agencies are no doubt already busy seeding the shadier parts of the Internet with Belarussian and Russian language versions of key business software packages that is absolutely laced with malware, backdoors, and all that good stuff, hoping that at least some of it will end up on government or other critical systems. Not somewhere I'd like to tread...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Disagree) by looorg on Thursday January 12, @09:24AM (1 child)
Trading with Belarus might violate some kind of sanction put in place. So either you have just committed some kind of aiding and abetting action with the enemy. Which is probably a lot worse then whatever the copyright mafia could have done to you.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday January 12, @05:48PM
The sanctions against Belarus seem to be limited to financial tools, military (and dual-use) products as well as related technologies: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/republic-of-belarus-sanctions-guidance/the-republic-of-belarus-sanctions-guidance [www.gov.uk]
Btw, Russia is adopting a similar law: https://www.rt.com/business/569616-russia-compulsory-licensing-law/ [rt.com]
Regardless, WIPO appellate court remains paralyzed by the US refusal to appoint a representative so there's nothing anyone can do about it short of escalating trade sanctions to the point Russia and Belarus would drop out of all pacts and form a new 2nd world order.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 12, @02:55PM
Does Belarus have this strange concept of "my own property" ?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday January 12, @04:35PM (1 child)
Copyright law tends to be enforced at the point of distribution. I'm not positive, but I think that is because if they catch you using content that you have no license for, all they can sue you for is what you would normally have paid for the license, while if they catch you distributing content that you have no license for, they can hit you with some really nasty penalties.
(Score: 1) by Techlectica on Friday January 13, @08:46AM
I expect it has more to do with cost effectiveness when it comes to cost of lawyers. Shut down, even temporarily, instances of The Pirate Bay and you prevent the distribution/creation of 100s of thousands of copies for much cheaper than it costs to sue those individual copies in the hands of end-users. Especially since not all countries' judiciaries are as keen as the USA on the use of John Doe subpoenas to obtain IP address assignments from ISPs with minimal evidence trails.
On the other hand, copies that are not properly owned/licensed in the countries where they are stored can still result in substantial fines, as BSA audits have proven in the past, regardless of where they originated (which could be from multiple countries when you're talking about something you got from a distributed torrent).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by inertnet on Thursday January 12, @09:17AM (2 children)
He and his buddy Putin can't stop whining about the evil west and its, in their eyes, depraved, decayed and perverse society. They're even stupid enough to start wars over it. But their citizens are now allowed to download and watch all that sinful western content.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday January 12, @09:39AM
It's probably to hard these days to block the kind of western entertainment people want or are used to. They are probably not going to be content with going back to sitting in the candle light and reading Das Kapital over and over again while watching East German sockpuppet shows, speeches from the Duma or ballet on TV.
That said I have not been to any of the classic eastern european countries in a while and watched TV there but I think they probably make decent copies of western shows -- you know the standard cop show, the doctor show, the romcoms etc. So they could probably do without on the TV front and possibly also music-wise. Movies tho might be another matter, there still are no real match for that. Or not in sufficient quantity and quality. The masses got used to their mass-entertainment and won't want to give it up anytime soon.
So unless you want to go all North Korea and start to execute people from smuggling in decadent entertainment from the west/south-korea you are probably better to just allow them to watch the pirated stuff. After all it's a great pacifier for the masses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13, @04:31AM
You don't know who started the war
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fraxinus-tree on Thursday January 12, @10:26AM
Some time ago, it used to be more convoluted, at least in my native Bulgaria, then part of the USSR block. The pirated software got "adapted" by some local (state-owned) publisher. The "adaptation" was to change the copyright string. Then, the software was sold by the local publisher as if it was their own. They even tried to fight the piracy of the "local" version.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Freeman on Thursday January 12, @02:34PM (1 child)
Here I thought Belarus was taking to the high seas to pirate some ships and their citizenry was to pay for it. Apparently, that's not the case. They're just not honoring the digital licensing agreements that most other nations honor. Or maybe just some, I'm not exactly sure who's on which side of the line or who just literally made their own lines and you have to do what they want or not get anything at all.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Touché) by isostatic on Thursday January 12, @07:58PM
Here I thought Belarus was taking to the high seas to pirate some ships and their citizenry was to pay for it
Well they are landlocked, so taking to the high seas is pretty tricky
The hijacking of Ryanair Flight 4978 was aircraft piracy though - and Belarussian officals have been formally charged with piracy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday January 12, @08:33PM (1 child)
When the infant US finally established copyright law, copyright only applied to works created here. As a result, American authors couldn't get published; the only overhead to publishing a foreign work was ink, paper, and the press operator's labor. No authors needed.
That, obviously, didn't last long. And the copyright then was only fourteen years.
I have nothing against copyrights as the Constitution says, "for limited times". The Supreme Court was obviously either drunk or taking bribes when they ruled that "limited" means whatever Congress says it means. If it's less than twenty years old I'll pay for it. Older than that, no way.
Bring back the public domain!
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 18, @05:39PM
I mean, the public domain still exists, it's just much, much older than one might argue than it was intended to be. At least as far as the USA is concerned. Public Domain and Copyright Law varies by country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"