11 September 2023

Supporting and Protecting Business in the Digital Sphere: Legal Benchmarks for the Far East

KEY CONCLUSIONS

Russia needs a unified digital platform for the accelerated development of industry and business

“The digital era has arrived, yet digitalization has not arrived at enterprises. At best, components of automation have arrived. Why? First, there is no basic system to introduce industrial digitalization. Second, there is no unified digital platform or domestic software. Managers and employees have also shown that they are not ready for digitalization. A huge number of local software systems and platforms have been developed and operate independently of each other in the country, and this prevents industrial enterprises and businesses from interacting and being competitive,” First Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma’s Committee on Regional Policy and Local Self-Government Sergey Morozov said.

“In theory, business is interested in the digital rights market. We conducted a survey late last year and almost 60% of companies noted the appeal of tools that are based on the circulation of digital rights. The situation looks much more modest taking into account this common interest,” Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs President Alexander Shokhin said.

Developing AI means introducing labelling for the content it produces

“Everything produced by AI must be labelled. Moreover, a decision has to be taken about this first, because I think we can only use identification to combat the scope of disinformation created by AI that we will encounter in the near future,” Senator of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Alexander Shenderyuk-Zhidkov said.

 

PROBLEMS

Lack of a unified platform to regulate digitalization and lawyers trained in this area

“We still don’t have a single federal department that brings together science, technology, technology policy, the digitalization of industry, and the digital economy […] We don’t have a final decision at the government level whether to regard artificial intelligence as first among the highest technological priorities. But our economic rivals do […] We don’t have a single centre to regulate and work out all the issues related to digitalization and artificial intelligence,” Morozov said.

“The second aspect of training lawyers is the mandatory presence of digital expertise. Today, a specialist must not only understand digital technologies and the digital economy, but must also be able to use these digital tools in his/her activities. It should be noted that digital economics is not always taught to lawyers. That means our lawyers don’t always understand what a digital economy is because it relates to economic disciplines […] I simply don’t have a standard to provide lawyers with this digital economy,” Synergy University Rector Artem Vasilyev said.

 

SOLUTIONS

Create a federal council on digital sovereignty and law

“We need to immediately create a council on digital sovereignty and law, and preferably under the Russian president. It must ensure the preparation of a national project that combines the development of the digital economy, technology, and artificial intelligence. We need a law on artificial intelligence and digital sovereignty. We have an understanding of what we could put into this law. We need to accelerate work on creating both an artificial intelligence standard itself and a set of rules concerning all areas of human activity in the digital environment. And, of course, we must adopt legislative measures to stimulate business to use artificial intelligence and digital technologies. This is crucial to catching up with our economic rivals as quickly as possible,” Morozov said.

Develop clear criteria for incorporating digital technologies into business

“Everyone understands the situation in which business finds itself due to the departure of major foreign IT players and vendors, and, essentially, the unilateral refusal to fulfil obligations. This new reality has created a large number of legal forks and grey areas. The mandatory software licensing initiative is obviously intended to solve one of these problems, but there are a number of nuances. The inability to pay the copyright holder doesn’t mean that the company using the software is doing this for free. Moreover, money has already been paid for the product. Alternative support often costs more than vendor support. In this regard, we need clear criteria and conditions to apply the mandatory licensing procedure to not only take into account the use of such software, but also the consequences that have arisen and are arising for business due to the unilateral departure of the vendor,” State Secretary – Vice President, Norilsk Nickel Dmitry Pristanskov said.

“I think it would be interesting to give our business the opportunity to not only use the digital rouble, but also the digital currencies of countries that have friendly relations with us,” Shenderyuk-Zhidkov said.

 

For more information, visit the Roscongress Foundation’s Information and Analytical System at roscongress.org/en.

 

Read more