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

John P. Ruehl

 June 30, 2026

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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 But what happens when your neighbor argues that inventions can’t be owned, and that intellectual property is no longer applicable based on the rules and regulations you have established?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 accession requirements and pressure and incentives from Western governments and corporations. Access to investment, markets, technology, and the global economy convinced Moscow that cooperation would be more constructive for national development.

China, of course, has been a principal target of claims about IP violations for Western companies. Beijing eased some tensions during the 2010s by improving its enforcement regime on intellectual property, and increasingly over recent decades, has focused on protecting the country’s expanding IP portfolio.

Ukraine

Hopes for further entanglement and collaboration with the Western IP regime were dashed after Ukraine entered the regional discussion. In the face of sanctions, Moscow increasingly explored legal avenues to limit the reach of foreign IP rights, citing national security concerns. It continued expanding its legal options over the next few years, including amending legislation in 2021 to allow the government certain use of patented inventions, utility models, and industrial designs without the rights holder’s consent.

The most significant changes followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Wartime measures introduced by Moscow against countries that had imposed additional sanctions on Russia allowed the use of patents and industrial designs from the sanctioning country without compensation, expanded parallel imports without the patentee’s consent, restricted royalty payments, and widened the state’s ability to authorize the use of protected technologies.

Russia’s decision to alter global IP rules caused shockwaves across the West, with The Conversation stating “The suspension of intellectual property rights as an economic weapon in the context of a conflict is unprecedented, at least in recent decades,” But in their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine argue that instead of a competitive market for innovations, patents have become a trading tool for powerful firms and countries in an oligopolistic patent market. From this perspective, challenging patent monopolies is essential to reducing dependence on foreign technology and increasing domestic innovative capabilities.

Russian courts have therefore shown greater willingness to entertain challenges to follow-on patents, arguing that secondary patents should not indefinitely delay generic competition once core inventions have entered the public domain. Russian officials and legal scholars attending the 2026 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, meanwhile, reinforced previous arguments that intellectual property rights are not absolute protections but economic privileges, subject to national development and competition objectives.

For many Russian firms, the risks of violating Western IP rights have also changed. Sanctions, market exits, and technology transfer restrictions have already cut many off from Western suppliers, reducing disincentives to continue using foreign technologies without authorization, particularly when supported by state policy.

While the 2026 state-managed system shows efforts to formalize the reassignment of IP, Moscow has stopped short of abandoning IP law altogether. Instead, it has sought to selectively weaken protections while preserving access to international trade and technology, and continues to use IP law to protect Russian inventions and companies abroad.

Post-Sanctions Developments

Some of the earliest signs of Russia’s new approach to IP drew attention for its impact on a variety of products and industries. Western brands such as Peppa Pig ended up in courtroom disputes over trademark control. The company that owns the rights to the popular children’s series had taken a Russian entrepreneur to court for drawing his own versions of Peppa Pig. Meanwhile, former McDonald’s franchises were taken over and rebranded by a local licensee, and there were media reports about microchips being stripped from imported home appliances to repair military equipment.

More consequential changes emerged at the industrial level. Parallel imports through third countries to bypass Western restrictions are being facilitated through close integration with China and its Eurasian Economic Union partners. Defense and dual-use technologies previously supplied by Western suppliers have been maintained, substituted, or replicated domestically. Western military equipment captured in Ukraine has been reverse-engineered, alongside civilian aerospace systems.

Foreign-owned automobile factories were meanwhile sold, frozen, or transferred to Russian operators before restarting under domestic branding. Russia’s car production fell from about 1.5 million vehicles in 2021 to roughly 600,000 before making a partial recovery in 2024, with sales of 756,000 vehicles, according to The Moscow Times. Several major facilities were later restarted under simplified production chains with increased reliance on imported components and Chinese supply chains, alongside output rebranding at former foreign-owned plants, such as Toyota.

Russia invited Chinese brands to fill the production gap, with their contribution rising from under 10 percent of automobile sales in Russia before the Ukraine war to more than 50 percent by 2023–2024. A large share of industrial capacity and investment has been redirected toward defense production and import substitution, making it difficult to determine the effects of Russia’s industrial and IP policies on the automobile sector.

The withdrawal of Western companies also exposed the dependency of modern economies on software and digital service networks. Reduced access to system updates, predictive maintenance, cloud services, and technical support created disruptions across the Russian industry and infrastructure.

Siemens, for example, suspended support for rail and industrial systems, while General Electric scaled back remote service and monitoring for gas and thermal turbines. SAP halted software used in factories, logistics, and energy, while Microsoft, Adobe, and other firms restricted services to software and cloud services for both businesses and consumers alike.

These measures have forced Russia to adapt to keep critical industrial systems operational. To support parts of its machine-tool sector previously dependent on Western hardware, Russian operators have relied on spare parts stockpiles, gray-market imports, and partial domestic substitution. For software, some equipment has operated offline using legacy software and local maintenance capabilities to replace vendor-linked support and update services.

At the consumer level, Russian authorities also signaled greater tolerance for software and media piracy, with Russian media emphasizing that domestic consumers had been exploited for profit by Western brands. Underlying this was the belief that dependence on foreign IP sends licensing revenues abroad and slows the development of domestic technological capabilities, as well as cultural sovereignty.

Impact on the Pharmaceutical Industry

Some of Russia’s most significant developments have occurred in the pharmaceutical sector, where tensions over IP predated the war. Seeking greater pharmaceutical security, Russia used state procurement programs and localization requirements to favor domestic producers, with courts increasingly willing to limit foreign patent protections. In 2017, Russian courts approved the production of certain patented medicines, including for HIV treatments, to the consternation of Western drug companies, who don’t conform to the idea of free medicine.

Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, in Information Feudalism, show how Brazil previously resisted pressure from the US government and pharmaceutical companies by threatening compulsory licensing for HIV/AIDS drugs in the 1990s and early 2000s, helping make treatment and prevention far more affordable. This approach was widely supported by medical scientists, AIDS activists, and international health organizations, according to the National Library of Medicine. In contrast, Russia lacked a comparable network. Western health organizations were viewed with greater suspicion in Moscow, limiting international support for efforts to expand access to affordable medicines. Russian health networks also faced greater isolation following the 2022 invasion, as Western sanctions and supply chains contributed to a more fragmented environment for international health cooperation.

As these pressures strained access to dozens of essential medicines, Russian authorities increasingly treated pharmaceutical patents as flexible when weighed against public health and public policy goals. Domestic firms expanded efforts to develop copies of complex medicines that would have faced major legal obstacles in other jurisdictions.

This has resulted in numerous high-profile disputes. In 2025, Russian biotech company BIOCAD received approval for its own version of Darzalex, the $10 billion-a-year cancer drug developed by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen. Boston-based Vertex has also accused the Russians of infringing patents linked to its cystic fibrosis treatment, Alyftrek. Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk has challenged Russian patents relating to semaglutide products, while Britain’s AstraZeneca also has multiple disputes with Russian manufacturers over the manufacture of cancer and diabetes medicines.

Russian courts continue to be a major battleground for IP disputes. According to The Pharma Letter, both foreign drugmakers and Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) have lost a series of cases involving generic products launched before the expiry of patents on the original drugs. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical trade tensions between Washington and the EU have weakened collective Western efforts to defend pharmaceutical IP abroad.

Between Fragmentation and Reform

Russia’s challenge to IP protections was extensive even before the war, with Russia’s Intellectual Property Rights Court accused of using unlicensed software by a former judge in 2018.

Moscow’s IP strategy is not yet systematically applied to the state. While Russia’s executive and legislative branches have steadily expanded mechanisms to weaken foreign IP protections, parts of the judiciary have been more cautious. Hostile states, including Russia, still seek foreign investment, technology transfer, and access to global markets, and even while challenging Western IP rights, Moscow continues to rely on similar protections for its own inventions and companies abroad.

Western companies have also avoided treating the rupture as permanent. Although many suspended or exited Russian operations, most maintained trademark and other IP registrations in anticipation of a possible return. Allowing these rights to lapse would risk losing control in one of Eurasia’s largest markets and potentially set precedents elsewhere, particularly in China. As a result, many firms continue to do business in Russia, driven not only by financial considerations but also to ensure IP protection.

Russia is not alone in challenging aspects of the current IP system. India and South Africa spearheaded an international effort during the COVID-19 pandemic seeking temporary waivers on IP protections to ensure greater access to vaccines, sparking wider discussions on greater flexibility under current rules during emergencies.

A related issue is the patenting of preexisting traditional knowledge. In 1995, researchers at the University of Mississippi’s Medical Center received a US patent for turmeric’s wound-healing properties, until India challenged it by providing evidence that the practice had long been part of traditional medicine. The patent was revoked in 1997, but showed how long-established, socially beneficial knowledge can be appropriated through patent systems.

Russia’s efforts to challenge the Western-dominated IP model have seen mixed results, with some success in sectors such as pharmaceuticals but limited progress in advanced semiconductors and high-end industrial technologies. At the same time, Moscow’s continued reliance on IP mechanisms to protect its own assets highlights their central role in global innovation, technology transfer, and international trade.

As history shows, the appropriation and adaptation of foreign technologies and knowledge have often contributed to rapid industrial catch-up and advancement, including in many countries that are now among the strongest defenders of IP protection.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. 

A Hard Reset for Corporate Power

David S. D’Amato

 July 1, 2026

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General Motors headquarters, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Earlier this month, Hawaii became the first state in the country to pass legislation aiming to get corporate money out of elections by using the law of business organizations. The groups supporting this innovative approach see it as part of a broader Corporate Power Reset movement. They want to stop artificial entities created by the law “from spending money or contributing anything of value to influence candidate elections or ballot measures.” They say that corporate charters, which are a state-granted special privilege, should not contemplate a right to interfere in electoral politics.

The legal theory is this: corporations are creatures of state law. States create corporate charters and define the powers corporations possess. Rather than directly regulating election spending, proponents argue states can instead rewrite their corporate codes to clarify that corporations were never granted the authority to engage in electoral spending in the first place.

But the real importance of the Hawaii legislation and the Corporate Power Reset movement, as I see it, goes far beyond elections and campaign contributions. It goes to a fact at the heart of our political and economic system: the state is the author of corporate power. And if the corporate form is the product of the state, it is worth asking what other powers and privileges have been concocted by political power on behalf of economic power. This movement therefore invites a much broader and deeper reconsideration of the corporate economy as a whole. If this corporate system and its history were better understood, the billionaire and trillionaire ruling class would no longer be able to take cover under the benign language of liberalism.

Contemporary political conversations talk a lot about the problem of money in politics, but they almost never acknowledge that modern corporate power did not arise from a system of liberal rights and open competition. Even the basic corporate privilege of limited liability is far from a natural right. The state-capital complex is fundamentally a system for the manufacture of asymmetric relationships and material inequalities. The Corporate Power Reset movement restarts a long-running conversation about where power is actually located and encountered. One of the under-discussed features of our system, whatever its name, is the formal state’s delegation of much of the coercive governance of day-to-day life. Americans today most often encounter the power of the state in their relationships with their employers. The power of corporations within this system is not a withdrawal of political power, and it should not be mistaken for one. It is a highly effective obscuring of political power within the language of law.

The corporate form is designed to be anti-competitive, to create special advantages. The origins of the corporation lie in state-created monopolies and in colonial violence and extraction, and the modern corporation arises alongside several other similar legal fictions created to concentrate capital and insulate its holders from liability or accountability to the public. The corporation was born of explicitly anti-liberal and anti-democratic special privilege. Prospective blanket limits on personal liability for the harms you’ve caused others does not seem very “free market.” In fact, this kind of moral hazard undermines the economists’ whole series of rationales for today’s system. Historically, the modern state and the corporation extend through each other’s power, co-creating each other and the world we live in today. The formal state has grown its own power in partnership with corporations, and the corporations’ whole position owes to gifts of common wealth and license from official power.

This binary model itself has never been consistent with events. The state and capital are not two free-floating, independent entities that enter into an agreement; they are historically co-produced, and the whole idea of a clear-cut binary and apparent separation is among the monumental ideological achievements of this system. The idea of political power withdrawing to open a free market is not the story of capitalism. The U.S. government today functions largely as a de facto private organization, designed to extract wealth from the popular masses and to redirect it to an ever-shrinking group at the top. Washington operates more and more openly in this way, as the administrative body of a system designed to concentrate wealth for elite club members, and, as importantly, to corral us for their benefit.

The sociologist Carly Knight asks, “How, then, did the image of the corporation as a ‘creature’ or a ‘creation’ of the state come to be replaced with an understanding of the corporation as a ‘pure creature of the market’?” What relationships are behind the concepts and terms we turn to so uncritically? Many early liberal thinkers looked askance at the corporation as an extension of the power of the state. They noticed the tendency of the corporation, with perpetual succession and limits on personal liability, to reintroduce the structures of aristocracy on behalf of capital. Anti-monopoly activist and writer William Leggett (1801-1839) wrote,

These are our aristocracy, our scrip nobility, our privileged order of charter-mongers and money-changers! Serfs of free America! bow your necks submissively to the yoke, for these exchequer barons have you fully in their power, and resistance now would but make the burden more galling. Do they not boast that they will be represented in the halls of legislation, and that the people cannot help themselves? Do not their servile newspaper mouth-pieces prate of the impolicy of giving an inch to the people, lest they should demand an ell?

Times have changed and we forget what we once knew well. But as we enter a stage in which the true relationship between the state and capital is more apparent, it will be increasingly difficult for polite defenders of the “scrip nobility” to defend this system in the terms of liberal democracy, choice, and the rule of law.

We have entered a “new era of corporate governance,” as the three largest asset management companies are now the largest shareholders in almost 90 percent of the S&P 500. While this position gives them enormous power, the lack of transparency as to their decision-making processes raises once more the question at the heart of the corporate system: given that our corporate economy is an extension of state power and functions in practice as one of our society’s dominant forms of governance, do massive corporations have any duties to the popular masses? The asset management cartel is just one of many examples. Common ownership at such scales has created a structure of governance within the corporate economy that has no historical precedent. We are talking about a problem much bigger than lobbying or campaign donations.

Massive scale requires the state in at least two senses and directions. As we’ve seen, the corporation extends out of the state directly, as it is state power that creates the legal and institutional privileges that make possible accumulation at such massive scales. These are not “natural” market outcomes in any sense; they are entangled with and structured by the state from the beginning. Capital never leaves the state behind. Once corporations achieve these scales, becoming central structural fixtures in society’s rulemaking processes, the state is even more structurally obligated to and intertwined with them. We see this in the “too big to fail” problem. The state has a structural inability to allow the failure of its children, the continuation and stability of which are key to its own fiscal and monetary health.

It is too seldom pointed out in the U.S. how much of the actual governance of society takes place within these sites of outsourced state authority, corporations. It is not even correct to see the co-creation and co-dependence of the state and capital as involving symmetrical relationships that run in opposite directions. The relationship is dynamic and recursive. The state lays the preconditions for the rule of accumulated wealth, and then the interests and desires of capital constrain and shape state action. And this ongoing process further concentrates and entrenches the “private” interests involved, thus further constraining the state. Neither of the two supposed spheres (and notice that the higher up you go, the easier it is to pass back and forth between them) is prior, and neither ever enters a moment of true separation from the other. Even in the case of the formal state’s work, much is conducted by nominally private corporations. And here, too, in its capacity as a buyer, the state creates immense privileges for its favorites. Over the past few years alone, private contractors have received trillions of dollars in public money, much of which has gone to aggressive, illegal wars, causing crises around the world. Today, there are more than two private contractors for every federal government employee, meaning that much of the U.S. government’s work is completed by private corporations that are a black box for the public.

The modern corporation never leaves the place of privilege and protection next to government; it is not subject to the same kinds of competition and resource pressure, because it has rights you don’t have and that are in no way natural to a free and open system of market exchange. But this recursive state-capital dynamic is the defining structural reality of our entire social system. And it is an authoritarian system, not a liberal one, which is why America is so heavily policed, her prisons so overflowing with poor and minority populations our ruling class wants to control. Beyond the domestic frontier, the violence at the core of the corporate system shows itself in the military empire that is necessary to enforce its values and rules. The state-capital complex arose precisely as a technology of global empire and resource extraction. Our form of politics is impossible without empire. Ours is a precariously balanced system of oligarchy and empire, not a liberal democracy.

Within such a system, the law is inverted, turned away from its stated purpose, holding in place a system of power and special privilege. It is the key infrastructure of the violence and injustice of the political and economic system. We have likewise inverted our value system, putting abstractions like the blessed limited liability company above human beings and their communities. We’ve emptied the concepts of their normative justification and placed the dead husk above justice: the government as a criminal cartel, and the law as an instrument of injustice.

We create these abstractions and legal artifacts at first to aid our efforts in the direction of positive social goals. But we have flipped the system and its goals on their head by severing the concepts from their original social justification. Without the critical capacities of earlier liberals, we have taken the corporation to be a self-justifying feature of all free societies, subordinating actual human beings to a fiction. This is how authoritarianism has been able to recreate itself in systems with so many different names and stated ideologies. Despite the insistence that this is what economic freedom looks like, we can see that earlier generations of Americans were correct to fear the corporation system as a path to a new aristocracy.

Thanks is owed to the Corporate Power Reset project for bringing a creative and critical spirit to the question of money in politics. Following their thinking to its conclusion would get us to a deep and fundamental shift in the way we think and talk about power and politics. This kind of critical approach forces a confrontation with the fact that the structural relationship between capital and political power is far from the localized corruption of an otherwise sound liberal society. The relationship between money and politics is the design of the system and its normal operative mode. It is not that political power and wealth left each other at some point and have reintegrated, but that they have always been intertwined and the supposed public-private divide is incomplete to the point of being false.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.