Putin Urges Government to Crack Down on Piracy

President Vladimir Putin on Monday urged his Cabinet and lawmakers to take stronger action against rampant video and music piracy, which has swept the Russian marketplace and caused growing international concern.

"I'm asking the Cabinet together with lawmakers in the State Duma to continue working to perfect legislation directed at strengthening the fight against piracy in the sphere of intellectual property rights," Putin said at the Cabinet session in remarks carried by Russian television.

The Russian Anti-Piracy Organization, established by the United States, has estimated that piracy in Russia costs the American movie industry up to $450 million a year. Officials said that in 1999, some 80 percent of videos sold in Russia were pirated.

Genuine movie DVDs cost up to the equivalent of $30 in Russia — too expensive for most average citizens. Pirate copies, however, can be purchased for around $5 from stalls and markets, often even before the film has been released in local cinemas.

Deputy Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev told the Cabinet session that police inspected 70,000 enterprises in the first nine months of this year, putting a halt to illegal activity at 482 of them and opening 2,724 criminal cases.

Putin visited Russia's most well-known film studio, Mosfilm, on Saturday, where he discussed piracy with some of the country's leading directors, who urged him to take a harder line.

"We have two tasks: fighting piracy and strengthening the legal base for the protection of intellectual property," Putin told them. "We have a lot of very good products. Recognition at the film festival [in Venice] is proof of this. But ... much remains to be done.

"It will be hard to compete [with foreign films] until we have mass production. In Hollywood they roll them out for the mass viewer and don't think about the creative process, but artistic films you can count on the fingers of one hand." (AP, MT)