13:34 18.12.2017

Creation in Ukraine of powerful IT products impossible without legislative overhaul

2 min read
Creation in Ukraine of powerful IT products impossible without legislative overhaul

It is necessary to completely change Ukrainian patent legislation and complete judicial reform to ensure conditions in Ukraine to allow the creation of powerful information technology (IT) products.

That's the opinion of the IT Ukraine Association's Vice President for Legal Issues, Alcor CEO Dmytro Ovcharenko, who told Interfax-Ukraine about Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine's regulation of operations involving software products.

"The idea of establishing a norm for freeing deliveries of software products from VAT would stimulate production of ready programs (products), instead of just man hours (services). It's better to sell assembled furniture and not wood, yes? At the same time, for this norm to actually help create new Viber or Skype products, it would be necessary to completely rewrite patent legislation, complete the creation of an uncorrupt and competent court, ideally a special court for intellectual property, like in the United States," he said.

Ovcharenko said current changes proposed to legislation are completely technical in nature, thus the norm, just as earlier, would be used not by software creators in Ukraine, but rather by distributors of foreign software packages.

"Currently Ukrainian patents are worth the paper they are printed on: all products from Ukraine are registered in the U.S. and added value (sometimes billions) remain there," Ovcharenko said.

As earlier reported Ukraine's parliament on December 7, 2017 adopted changes to the Tax Code of Ukraine (Law No 6676-d) and introduced the definition of operations using software, payments on which are not considered royalties, as well as strengthened statutes involving taxation issues from 2013 on freeing software deliveries from VAT.

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