Leaving aside the huge burden that building new stadiums, roads and airports have placed on Ukraine’s taxpayers, and all the questions about the transparency of the public procurement procedures, this is definitely good news.
Which only makes the story of ProstoPrint uglier.
This small custom T-shirt manufacturer was charged with producing T-shirts that had illegally copied the Euro 2012 logo.
What makes this situation controversial is that the same company also happens to produce T-shirts carrying the “Thank you to the people of Donbas” line, the first part of an explicit rhyming soccer fans’ chant in Russian meant to offend President Viktor Yanukovych.
ProstoPrint’s owner Denis Oleinikov fled the country, fearing arrest, and is planning to ask for political asylum in Latvia.
His T-shirt business has been virtually destroyed. This is not to say that Oleinikov is an angel. According to lawyers for UEFA, he has been repeatedly warned about violating their client’s intellectual property rights.
Yet, for Ukraine, where piracy flourishes and items with fake logos or pirated content are readily available, having the organized crime police crack down on a private entrepreneur who makes fake T-shirts raises a lot of questions. And this is where the “people of Donbas” shirts come to mind.
This sounds too much like recent events in Russia, where local law enforcers began cracking down on non-governmental organizations, also, using the pretext of violating intellectual property rights, namely, using pirated Microsoft software.
As a result, last September Microsoft officially announced that they consider any pirated software used by NGOs in Russia and a few other post-Soviet states as legal, and have no claims against these organizations.
UEFA should follow Microsoft’s footsteps and lift its claims against ProstoPrint. Any losses from a few bootlegged T-shirts are not worth having your organization’s name associated with case that looks like banal revenge for the offensive T-shirts on the part of the authorities.
