Russia Defends Rights to Arms

"We are against countries making small arms that were designed in Russia without our permission," Pyotr Litavrin, deputy head of security and disarmament at the Foreign Ministry, told reporters.

Russia, which in Soviet times supplied its arms technology free-of-charge to countries in Eastern Europe and Asia, has lost its leadership in the small arms market over the past decade, estimated to be worth around $4 billion annually.

Russia sells up to $60 million in small arms per year, said Marat Kenzhetayev, an expert with the Center for Arms Control think tank. Earlier this year, Russia agreed to sell 100,000 Kalashnikovs to Venezuela for $50 million.

In its fight for UN support, Russia plans to push the issue of intellectual property rights at a conference next year on illicit small arms trading, Litavrin said.

The conference will review the Program of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All its Aspects, which the UN adopted in 2001.

Last month, when the UN met to review the progress of its implementation, Russia raised the intellectual property rights issue, Litavrin said.

"If we make pirated CDs, it is considered a crime, but when it comes to weapons, which is more serious, they turn a blind eye to it," Litavrin said.

With unlicensed manufacturing rife in many parts of the world, Russia has quite a battle on its hands. The issue is further complicated by the lack of regulation on property rights in Soviet times.

"The Kalashnikov has flooded the entire world because even the notion of production under a license did not exist in the Soviet Union," said Litavrin. "You can get Kalashnikovs for $100 apiece, whereas the one that we produce costs many times that amount."

Furthermore, manufacturers in the former Eastern Bloc made modifications to the original rifle and then assumed their own rights to the amended product, said Moscow-based independent small arms expert Maxim Pyadushkin.

Since it hit mass production in 1949, more than 100 million Kalashnikovs have been sold in more than 50 countries.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, who designed the weapon in 1947, later got a Stalin award of 150,000 rubles, roughly enough to buy 10 cars at the time.

"I didn't get a single kopek from all those millions of Kalashnikovs widely selling abroad," Kalashnikov, 85, said in an interview last month.

"I didn't have a patent, as the Soviet Union recommended not to have patents," he said. "This is not fair. I was in America and know how other designers live, but I am a child of that time and had to live by the laws. I didn't make anything."

Kalashnikov now owns a three-room apartment in Izhevsk, over a thousand kilometers east of Moscow, a small wooden dacha and a Ford.

Source: Moscow Times