CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

How Russia is Upending the West’s Attempt to Control Technology With Intellectual Property

Spasskaya Tower, the Kremlin. Photo: Крылов Иван. CC BY-SA 4.0

Taking an invention and claiming it as yours is called intellectual property, based on practices followed by US and European businesses. But what happens when your neighbor argues that inventions can’t be owned, and that intellectual property is no longer applicable based on the rules and regulations you have established?

In March 2026, Russian officials announced plans to develop a state-managed system for the “temporary administration” of the intellectual property of foreign companies from “unfriendly countries” that left Russia after the 2022 Ukraine invasion. The move drew immediate concerns in policy and legal circles and is one of Moscow’s latest challenges to the Western-led system of patents, copyrights, and trademarks that has developed over centuries.

What Led to the Development of Intellectual Property

Before the modern IP system, creators could be protected through reputation, guild membership, secrecy, patronage, or state-granted monopolies. Early precursors to today’s framework took place in Venice, including printing monopolies in 1469, and reflected efforts to control the value of reproduced knowledge. Another milestone was the Venetian Patent Statute of 1474, which granted inventors time-limited exclusive rights over new creations. The European Enlightenment later helped spread the notion across the region that inventions and ideas could be legally ownable property, laying the foundations for modern IP law to develop in different states.

While powerful Western firms and states have the greatest stake in maintaining the existing system, given the advantages it ensures for key industries, that wasn’t always the case. From the late 18th century to the early 20th century, the US often relied on weak foreign IP enforcement, copying European industrial and scientific innovations, which “propelled the United States forward and quickly transformed it into one of the world’s leading industrial powers,” according to author Christopher Klein. British writer and journalist Charles Dickens, among others, meanwhile, complained about the widespread reprinting of books without royalties.

Jane K. and Peder Sather Professor of History at UC Berkeley, Carla A. Hesse, noted in an essay that US attitudes toward IP shifted from an “objectivist-utilitarian” emphasis on shared knowledge to a “universalist-natural-rights” view that prioritized exclusive rights over the country’s growing number of inventions. This was also seen in Germany, where firms became known for reverse-engineering machine tools and improving foreign chemical products. The country later became a strong advocate of patent protection.

When these economies caught up technologically, incentives converged to help drive the creation of international IP rules. The 1883 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property and the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works were milestones in establishing the modern global IP system.

The Russian challenge to the notion of IP goes back more than a century, with the Russian Empire only partially engaging with emerging global IP regimes before its 1917 Revolution. While adopting patent and trademark laws on paper, it applied them unevenly and with minimal enforcement, while focusing on state control over strategic industries and foreign technology transfers. Later, the Soviet Union joined some international agreements, including the Universal Copyright Convention (1952) and Patent Cooperation Treaty (1970), while avoiding others such as the Berne Convention.

Hesse and economist Ha-Joon Chang have noted that since the 1970s, the US and Western Europe have increasingly used trade sanctions and agreements to pressure developing nations to adopt their preferred IP standards. Institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have helped export Western-style IP rules, transforming intellectual property into a tool of economic governance that helped leverage technological progress.

Following the Soviet collapse, Russia moved its IP regime closer to Western standards in the 2000s and early 2010s, driven by WTO........

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