The Great Expert Blog

A Governmental commission, headed personally by the Prime Minister has been created in Russia recently in order to counteract the infringements in the sphere of intellectual property. As he stated earlier, little is done for the protection of intellectual property rights in Russia and, therefore, both the rights owners and the state are actually robed. Are there any changes today in this area? What contribution has customs service made in order to protect business intellectual property rights? How can the consumers be sure that when buying medicines, products or clothes of known manufacturers they will get the goods that they expect?

It is certain that the problem has not been solved instantly. Today Russia suffers severe economic damage caused by the infringements of the author’s and adjoining rights, misuses of inventions, trade marks, from uncollected tax revenues, and from the impossibility to increase national economic production of goods because of unfair competition.

Counterfeit aviation and automobile spare parts, fake combustive-lubricating materials, toys, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, food are frequently dangerous to health and life of the population, and pose real threat to national safety of this country.

Starting Point

A legal base of interaction between customs bodies with other law-enforcement and control organs has been created in Russia; Rospatent, a State body which acts as federal enforcement authority in the field of intellectual property protection is now a part of the team.
Joint actions are carried out according to the guidelines of interdepartmental recommendations and measures, aimed at ensuring intellectual property protection, that have been developed and approved by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, by the State Customs Committee, and by Federal Tax Police Service and coordinated with the State Office of the Public Prosecutor of Russia.
Multiple changes and modifications to the legislation, regulating intellectual property protection have been adopted. They helped define customs and state regulations of the foreign trade activity, administrative infringements, and the criminal legislation.

Suspicion of Illegal Trafficking

The legitimate rights owner who has reasonable grounds to believe that his intellectual property rights could be infringed during customs clearance through the border of Russia can file a complaint with the State Customs Committee (SCC) of Russia and request the protection of his rights. The efficiency of this protection directly depends on the completeness of the information submitted by the legal owner who can assist customs bodies in counterfeit products identification. Such data can include information on the places of import and customs registration of legal production, information on exporters, importers of legal production, on distinctive signs of counterfeit goods, etc.

After consideration of application and, if required, after additional verification of the stated information, the documents issued by the State Customs Committee of Russia and the corresponding information are filed with the supervising customs bodies of Russia.
As practice shows, the infringements of the intellectual property rights are quite often accompanied by violations of customs rules. The examples of such are: import of a cargo, for example, claimed to be used for non-commercial purposes, falsified documentation and customs declarations, undeclared or falsely declared products, as well as other infringements for which administrative responsibility is stipulated by the law.

Enforcement Practice

On July, 1, 2002 the new Administrative Violations Code (AVC) of the Russian Federation came into effect which stipulates administrative responsibility for copyright infringement and illegal use of trade marks. The procedural part of the Code states that customs bodies have the right to file reports of the above-stated intellectual property rights infringements discovered during customs control.
The reports, filed by customs bodies serve as a legal ground for court judgments imposing administrative penalties and fines and/or confiscation of the imported goods that violate copyright or other intellectual property rights or trade marks.

The state bodies conducted the analysis of the trade mark protection enforcement practice. The conducted study resulted in the development of guidelines and recommendations for the customs bodies on revealing and punishing offences connected to illegal use of trade marks. Those guidelines define the actions and serve as the legal ground for customs bodies actions and are based on concrete examples.

Customs bodies of foreign states control from several thousand up to several tens of thousand of trade marks. The customs bodies of Russia, according to the information of legal rights owners, control about 450 trade marks which are filed with the intellectual property register of the State Customs Committee of Russia.

The next step is to develop methodical recommendations concerning the owner’s legal and adjoining rights.

The analysis of court judgments shows that there is an urgent need to review the current judicial practice and submit it for consideration to the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation.

It is necessary to note, that the first enforcement practice results have shown the necessity to update the administrative violations legislation. In particular, it is required to add to the Code the regulations on conducting investigations with the purpose of their qualitative pre-trial study and add legal permission to conduct the necessary examinations.
It would be expedient to increase the impeachment timeframe, as law breakers, in some cases, delay proceedings by every possible means, and go unpunished because of the impossibility to impeach them just two months after the date of the offence.

The “Greys” Consolidate

A tendency disturbing enough surfaced recently and is connected to “grey” importers joining efforts to counteract the measures adopted by the State Customs Committee of Russia and by customs bodies. The given counteraction is carried out as in the legal field (disputing in due order the requirements of normative legal acts, appealing the actions of customs bodies and their officials), as with the use of financial and administrative resources.

The New Code - The New Opportunities

Starting January, 1, 2004, when a shipment of products is suspected to be counterfeit, the customs bodies are given the right to detain the goods or delay the release of the goods containing objects of intellectual property for up to 20 days, and to inform the legal owner as well as a number of other rights.

The turn-over of the counterfeit goods will considerably decline in case of the intellectual property legislation control at all stages of the foreign economic transaction, starting with the signing of the contract and followed by customs registration.

Copyright 2005 OpenRussia.ru
Russian business directory

Florida U.S. Representative Tom Feeney recently explained that
lobbyist Jack Abramoff misled his office and also, the Ethics
Committee regarding the $5,643 financing of a 2003 Scotland
trip.

Feeney accepted $4000 in Abramoff contributions and also
accepted $10,000 from ex-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay
(R-Texas), recently indicted on campaign finance conspiracy
charges. (DeLay himself received $30,500 from Abramoff).

I’m certain Feeney can explain the political financial
contributions from indictees Abramoff and DeLay, as can Florida
Representatives Ginny Waite-Brown ($1500), Mark Foley ($13,531),
and Katherine Harris ($22,000) All are incumbents campaigning
for 2006 reelection in their respective districts, or in the
case of Ms. Harris, campaigning for U.S. Senator. I’d be remiss
not to mention Representative Dave Weldon’s acceptance of
$13,569.00 from DeLay. I’m certain Weldon can explain this
financial contribution as he too, runs for reelection this year.

All the above mentioned politicians voted with DeLay at least
93% of the time and all voted for weaker Ethics rules for DeLay.
Money and politics certainly make strange bedfellows.

The fact these financial contributions created a loyal
Congressional voting block among the representatives is one
explanation we will not hear during this election. The old “You
scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” explanation.

Vote them out.

Guns were invented to kill people. Isn’t it time for us to move upward on the ladder of civilization and admit that we are better off without them? Hand guns have the advantage of being unnoticed in a crowd until the last minute. Rifles are so accurate that the victim doesn’t have a chance. Assault weapons are the same as rifles with the added feature of being able to kill more people faster. The old ploy of gun lovers is that they need guns to protect themselves from other gun lovers. Gun clubs exist to allow them to hit their targets better. Not having guns in the house would save the lives of thousands of people, many being children.

Of course, facing reality, we know that guns wouldn’t disappear over night, even if the right legislation were passed. But a ban on the sale and private ownership of hand guns would be a start in the right direction. I concur that rifles could be useful to the police in a situation where lives were at stake, as when a crazed killer is on the loose. But I can’t think of any place guns have in the lives of teachers, students, music lovers, and the rest of the peace loving world. I abhor war as much as anyone, but I believe that when criminals use force, ignoring the laws of the land, to harm innocent people, then it leaves the authorities no recourse but to eliminate these killers any way we can, including using guns.

Two hundred years ago citizens used guns to kill animals for food and to protect themselves in a wild, lawless country where danger was a way of life. The somewhat unclear portions of the Constitution that gives people the right to bear arms is believed by many knowledgeable historians to refer to mercenaries and volunteer soldiers, not anybody. There are many problems connected with the removal of guns from the populace. One method used by many communities is an offer by the police department to buy outright any guns brought in without penalty to the ‘owner’. This program has proved successful but only partially effective. (Allowing only one week of the year for this opportunity may have something to do with it.) I think that the price offered is much too little to attract those people with guns who are afraid to bring them in for fear of reprisal. Laws could be passed to restrict the sale of rifles to duly appointed authority and a ban placed on the sale of hand guns to the general populace. Just my opinion.

Comments welcome.

The Neoplatonic Hierarchy:

The twentieth century has seen a lot of mega-corporate and bureaucratic growth. The old top-down or Platonic hierarchy form of control has been exposed to the extent that Harvard Business Journal has recommended corporate paranoia and detailed the ‘Nut Island Effect’ wherein Empires of inefficiency abound. There are alternative forms of organizational design which have also shown promise and keeping the decision-making near to where the results are expected seems to be necessary and often will include employee ownership (Lincoln Electric was an early example) or bottom-up participation as well as Quality Circles. I will address the international and larger picture recommendations of futurists like Alvin Toffler towards the end of this book. For now we might simply try to understand why the top-down approach was necessitated.

There were situations where elites tried to keep all their clan up to speed and involved in the governance of their enterprises as recently as Carthage. Aristotle was surprised to witness this in his book Politics. The Keltic Dirfines and Incan or Mayan sharing systems were also superior to the kind of thing Plato formalized as society in the Mediterranean moved away from the meritocracies that had existed in places like Egypt. I can understand why Plato’s ancestor Solon wisely did a lot of what he did. The average person was enamoured with power wherever they could get it. Sex with younger males or mentoring systems like Pederasty is part of what was happening. Women were seen as chattel since Hammurabi had made them the property of men in a nearby culture administered by the same elite family that Solon belonged to. I can’t absolutely prove the lineage of Solon is the same as the Ptolemaic and their De Danaan roots but I can be sure that most noble Greeks were related to these gifted people who go by many names including Danaus or Homer’s DNN. Solon made a last stab at protecting property rights for women.

In 2350 BCE the main leader of this area was Sargon the Great. Unfortunately the myth of the basket and the bulrushes that was part of his life later became enacted with another of his extended family. Yes, Moses (whoever and how many people he might be) was just telling another old myth in the same fashion that Plato was immaculately conceived before Yeshua. We have a lot of archaeological evidences to show this Hyksos period saw the development of the hierarchy that now rules us. I have covered in great detail these facts in at least ten other books and new facts in support of my theories come in every month if not more often. I cannot recall any evidence that does not fit my history and thus prove the Empire journalists were lying to us. The Shardana architecture is one of the better evidences but linguistics and the Tarim Basin red heads have helped a lot. Lice, Hobbits, Chaos Science (String Theory) and DNA as well as the Peruvian Cocaine all join the list. Nevertheless you still have people fighting to affirm lies and frauds that our nations, history, racism and treatment of our fellow lifeforms on earth are organized under.

Plato got one thing very right. He said that the advent of writing (The Phoenicians gave them a script that could be used for writing about a millennium earlier.) had diminished the ability of average people. The discipline of Brotherhood and thinking or the Joy of story-telling had kept a modicum of egalitarianism alive. Today you have a majority of people on earth who think the likes of Fox News and their teachers are capable and disciplined tellers of truth. The ethics that allowed the people of the United States to accept the assassination of JFK, Lincoln, Garfield and the other leaders I am addressing in this book is proof of Plato’s contentions. I still hope that the ‘Spin’ surrounding such things as Watergate and Iran/Contra might get corrected. I hope it becomes attached to the people who still appear to run the show just as the courts are starting to hear evidence against George Bush from survivors of slave camps like Auschwitz and the likes of IBM who tracked all Jews for Hitler. I don’t hold my breath as I wait and see if people telling the truth about the Patriot Act being a furtherance of the Gestapo are actually listened to. But I am heartened to see Gore Vidal has not stopped looking and Chomsky’s books are selling.

Of course the whole story is seldom addressed by any one author due to the extent of the lies. I think I have pretty much done the job now. In every area of social governance and science I have made a strong case in some fifty books. Most people don’t read that many books in their adult life. I don’t include romance novels and the like when I say that.

About the Author

Author of Diverse Druids, Columnist for The ES Press Magazine, Guest ‘expert’ at World-Mysteries.com

When I was a kid, we talked about such things as the Side-Hill Troggler. This species is missing in more than one way. I couldn’t find it on the Internet, but I did find the following at http://www.algebra.com/algebra/about/history/Munchers.wikipedia

In all the Munchers games, the player controlled a green “Muncher” character across a grid of squares containing a short numerical or word expression. The objective is to consume all and only the grids containing information satisfying a specific criterion (determined by the mode of play) while also avoiding the deadly “Troggle” monsters (name probably derived from troglodyte) which roamed the grid.

That might be close. Let’s look up troglodyte.

In the Devil’s Dictionary I found the following: http://devil.kaywa.com/t/troglodyte.html

Troglodyte (By Ambrose Bierce at 14:12) n. specifically, a cave-dweller of the Paleolithic period, after the Tree and before the Flat. A famous community of troglodytes dwelt with David in the Cave of Adullam. The colony consisted of “every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented” in brief, all the Socialists of Judah.

Yeah! Right!

Well, that is not the definition I was looking for. Let’s try Dictionary.com: They have a big entry that you should find fun to read. I don’t want to copy the whole text here because they might become angry with me. The bottom line here is that a Troglodyte is a cave dweller. Read on at http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2004/04/17.html

A flashing sign at Dictionary.com said I could win a vacuum cleaner. I didn’t click on it. It probably would have brought up a survey form that would take a month of Sundays to complete. Then it would lay down seven requirements costing me money to actually get the vacuum cleaner. The dirt stays on the floor.

What? You clicked on it?

Well, I’m an old man and I must restore lost knowledge to the world’s youth. A Side-Hill Troggler was an ancient beast that had long legs on one side and short legs on the other. That made it easy for him to walk transverse to a steep slope. His body was always level.

There was one slight problem for the Side-Hill Troggler. He could not turn around and go back. That would just make things worse with the long legs on the wrong side of his body. The poor critter would just tumble on down the mountain.

The Side-Hill Troggler became extinct when it came to the End of the World.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

We have a lot of One-Way Harrigans in our society. They can only think in one direction and they are never able to turn back.

That is another character that must be extinct: Wrong-Way Harrigan. My wife sang me the song Harrigan. Before it is lost too, let me give you a copy here from http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=10360

HARRIGAN

Lyrics and Music By George M. Cohan, 1907

H-A- Double R-I
G-A-N spells Harrigan!
Proud of all the Irish that’s in me.
Divil a man can say a word agin me!
Oh, H-A-Double R-I
G-A-N you see!
It’s the name,
That no shame has ever been connected with
It’s a name that a shame never has been connected with
Harrigan, that’s me!

Having disposed of Harrigan and getting to the subject of one-way thinkers, we have a preponderance of them in Washington D.C.

Of course these are our present leaders. President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald H. Rumsfeld are examples.

Their extinction is most eminent.

Somebody call the World Wildlife Fund.

Meanwhile watch out for those deadly “Troggle” monsters.

Copyright2006©John T. Jones, Ph.D.

John T. Jones, Ph.D. (tjbooks@hotmail.com, a retired VP of R&D for Lenox China, is author of detective & western novels, nonfiction (business, scientific, engineering, humor), poetry, etc. Former editor of Ceramic Industry Magazine. He is Executive Representative of IWS sellers of Tyler Hicks wealth-success books and kits. He also sells TopFlight flagpoles. He calls himself “Taylor Jones, the hack writer.” More info: http://www.tjbooks.com Business web site: http://www.aaaflagpoles.com