If you’re a music lover, spend any length of time in Moscow and you’ll inevitably visit the Gorbushka market. This is almost heaven for music and film aficionados. Gorbushka is rumored to be the biggest pirate-bootleg-underground music, film and notably – software – market outside of Hong Kong. Hundreds of stalls on two levels of a converted television factory feature European, American, and other genres of electronic, classical, folk, techno, and pop screechers in mp3 format. DVD films of movies still running in American theatres can often be found in the stacks at Gorbushka, although the quality is sometimes dicey. A colorful and entertaining blog entry on Gorbushka, along with good pictures, can be found on a Moscow blog.

Equally prominent at Gorbushka are vendors offering cut-price system software, work programs, and games for PCs and to a lesser degree Macs. In fact, some eighty percent of all software traded in Russia is bootleg. Too, word is that hard drives with gigabytes of critical personal information stored on them are available for sale behind Gorbushka’s back doors. Visitors, vendors, and even Russian police barely blink an eye at all this. And so far, there has been little that the United States or Europe has been able to do to curb all this.

Here, a lesson may be drawn from Soviet history. Back then, the notion of copyright laws did not exist as they did in the West. Books, published papers, recorded music and certainly computer programs were not protected because strictly speaking, they were the property of the State. Computer hardware, machine language, and software did not belong to the individuals who created them, and these people could not profit monetarily from their product’s serial production or distribution. This sort of thinking has hung on in the new Russia and former Soviet republics.

On November 19, 2006 the United States and Russia signed an agreement to close down www.allofmp3.com, a Russian-based service that sells digital music very cheaply, free of copy protection. Allofmp3.com, however, is cited an example of the larger scope of what the Russian government is expected to do according to the agreement, which includes the eventual regulation of pharmaceuticals, and a crackdown on counterfeit goods, optical media factories, and disc piracy.

When or how effectively these measures will come to bear on markets like Gorbushka and particularly software and computer piracy, and how well new laws applying to these problems will be enforced within Russia is too hard to predict yet. Russia will likely take some action on these requirements soon: seeking entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), Russia’s enforcement measures for Intellectual Property Rights will be under review by current WTO members.

A copy of the official document signed by both Russia and the United States is at the Office of the United States Trade Representative. Digg also featured a lively discussion of this topic.