World Trade: Surrender of a Pirate

A U.S. cartoonist, poking fun at the Soviet propensity for stealing the inventions of other nations, once created a Russian inventor named Regus Patoff, an acronym for the omnipresent "Reg. U.S. Pat. Off." Last week, after decades of pirating others' ideas without so much as a thank you, the Russians joined the Paris Convention of 1883, the pact under which 67 nations agree to honor one another's patents and trademarks. In the future the Russians will have to pay the same licensing fees as everyone else when they cast a covetous eye on a new product or process. In return, the West is taking steps to recognize the U.S.S.R.'s internal system of "inventors' certificates" as equivalent to patents.

The Russians had a change of heart simply because they see rising opportunities for trade with the West and did not want their pirating to stand in the way. Moreover, Russian technology is beginning to devise a number of items that other nations might be interested in (one example: sophisticated oil-drilling gear), and the Russians want to get paid for their use. "The Soviets have come to realize that they may get more profit from joining than from staying out," says Dr. Georg Bodenhausen, head of the Geneva-based International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property, which administers the Paris pact.

The pact is hard to enforce if anyone really wants to circumvent it; Boden-hausen's organization has no legal weapons against transgressors, simply passes along complaints to governments involved. Any member of the pact can unilaterally exempt specific products from patent protection; Italy has done so with Pharmaceuticals, thus enabling Italian firms to copy the world's new drugs as fast as they are invented. Several big nations, such as India, Pakistan, Argentina and Chile, remain outside the system, some of them figuring that they invent too little to profit from it. Nor does the pact protect artistic or literary copyrights, which come under the Bern Convention—to which the Russians still refuse to subscribe.

Though the patent accord will move the U.S.S.R. closer to an interchange of technology with the West, the Russians will continue to pirate foreign books as often as they please.