How brand holders have deprived counterfeiting of legitimacy in Russia since the early 2000s

Ch. 11. P. 217–236.

Kotelnikova Z.

This chapter focuses upon the ambivalence of global brand holders’ behaviour with regard to counterfeiting. The author reconstructs a historical perspective showing how global brand holders, as highly powerful economic actors, enforced their intellectual property rights and contributed to the reduction of fake goods in the Russian markets between the early 2000s and 2010s. The chapter is based on 90 in-depth interviews, including 51 interviews with managers of transnational companies and 39 interviews with officials from enforcement agencies and legal experts. The findings showed that global brand holders were reluctant to fight counterfeiters out of fear of losing consumers who might stop buying their products, knowing fakes were in circulation. The situation becomes even more complicated if we take account of the fact that counterfeit goods helped transnational companies to promote their brands, especially at the stage of market penetration. Finally, global brand owners considered it too costly to fight counterfeiting through civil lawsuits and thus sought to make more efficient use of administrative and criminal law. To pursue their private interests, transnational companies joined together to form trade associations and forged an informal alliance with authorities. The branded manufacturers made a lot of effort to reframe the struggle with fakes as being in the public interest and to shift the boundaries between illegitimacy and legitimacy in relation to counterfeiting in a bid to discipline the local markets

Keywords: intellectual property, counterfeiting, ambivalence

In book

The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century Economy: Cases from Russia and beyond

L.: UCL Press, 2022.