Last 23 December 2013 Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov passed away at age 94. If the name seems somewhat familiar, it’s because the former Russian general and small arms designer (who had little technical training yet managed to rise to the top of his country’s armaments industry, became somewhat of a folk hero in his country, and traveled the world as the de facto face of Russian weaponry) responsible for one of the most omnipresent weapons in the world: The AK-47.
The AK-47 – which stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova – became ubiquitous because it has all the advantages that a commercial product needs in order to become successful on the market: reliable, easy to use, and inexpensive to mass produce. Unfortunately, Mikhail Kalashnikov wasn’t able to patent the designs for the AK-47.
It’s not that Russia didn’t have patent laws on their books during the Soviet period (1923-91), they did. But they were generally not observed - especially in the case of the AK-47, which borrowed heavily from foreign technology (the AK-47 is influenced by the American M1 Garand/M1 Carbine and the Remington Model 8 rifle). The Soviets would only respect patents if it was convenient, or basically if it was much cheaper to get the patent holder/inventor to help with implementation rather than just stealing the technology and reverse-engineering it for their own purposes. This means the concept of intellectual property was largely ignored – a kind of thinking that eventually came back to bite them in the post-Soviet world, as the Russians are now having a hard time enforcing rights to Soviet-era Russian inventions.
The patent for the AK-47 was acquired by the Izhevesk Machine Tool Factory in the late 90s, but it is struggling to get companies in China, Poland, Romania, Israel, and even the U.S. to pay licensing fees for manufacturing AK-47s and variants based on the original design. The defenses used run the gamut – from stating that the produced weapons are improvements over the AK-47 with only superficial similarity to Kalashnikov’s original design, to claims that Russia has already abandoned the original patented design in the 70s when they switched to the 5.45mm AK-47. The fact that Russia has also replaced the original AK-47 design in 1963 with the similar-looking AKM is also used.
By all rights, the amount of weapon patents that Izhsmash holds should have been a great source of income for the company, but instead resulted in a morass of litigation and legal expenses.