The Office of the United States Trade Representative

Special 301 Report Priority Foreign Country
05/03/2004

PRIORITY FOREIGN COUNTRY

UKRAINE

The United States withdrew Ukraine's benefits under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program in August 2001 and imposed $75 million worth of sanctions on Ukrainian imports on January 23, 2002. These sanctions remain in effect based on the repeated failure of the Government of Ukraine to enact and enforce adequate optical disc media licensing legislation in order to fully comply with the June 2000 U.S.-Ukraine Joint Action Plan to Combat Optical Media Piracy. The Ukrainian Government has drafted amendments to the existing Optical Disc Licensing Law to address the law's inadequacies, but Ukraine's Rada has failed to pass these amendments on several occasions. As a result, Ukraine's law does not have adequate enforcement provisions to prevent unauthorized optical media production and distribution. Ukraine is also a major trans-shipment point and storage location for illegal optical media produced in Russia and elsewhere. While Ukraine has taken some steps to address its optical media piracy problem, border enforcement efforts remain weak and small criminal penalties for unauthorized production and export of CDs and CD?ROMs do not act as an effective deterrent. As a result, there continue to be extremely high levels of piracy and substantial losses to U.S. industry. Trademark counterfeiting is also a serious problem and U.S. firms remain concerned over the lack of cooperation by enforcement officials in combating counterfeiting activities. The United States urges the Ukrainian Government to pass amendments to its optical media law to provide for adequate enforcement. Ukrainian officials also must strengthen current enforcement efforts to deter optical media piracy and address trademark counterfeiting.