False contracts are ubiquitous, lending a semblance of legitimacy to trade in pirated goods and providing police and the courts with a handy excuse to treat such crimes with leniency. While the copyright law appears to be compatible with the Berne Convention, several serious problems remain, including the lack of protection for foreign sound recordings, the failure to criminalize end-user software piracy, the unavailability of statutory damages for copyright infringement and the unavailability of ex parte civil search orders. Estonian government ministers have indicated that copyright protection is not yet a national priority, and nothing has been done to address the prevailing attitude among police, prosecutors and judges that piracy is not a serious crime. Estonia still has no state body responsible for intellectual property matters. The recording industry is working to raise awareness of the concept of copyright, and of the need for protection of sound recordings.
Pirate videos are widely available in video shops, street kiosks, and open-air markets.
False contracts are ubiquitous, even in the smallest kiosks, lending a semblance of legitimacy to the trade and providing police and the courts with a handy excuse to treat such crimes with leniency. Pirate videos from Estonia now are spreading abroad, most notably to Finland. Many of these counterfeits are copied in Estonia from original Finnish-language videos. The pre-release titles come almost exclusively from video recordings made in U.S. cinemas, which are transshipped to Estonia via Moscow. Pirate video copies of almost all major U.S. titles are on the streets in Estonia within days of their US theatrical release.