Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:
Dmitry Medvedev: I am glad to have this opportunity to see you again. As far as I remember the last time we met was in Deauville, France – an interesting combination of people from the IT industry, representatives from the internet community and other country’s leaders. You said you felt a little unusual in this company. In any case, we had an interesting discussion, although not about every issue. That meeting was a long time ago, at least according to the modern pace of life – over a year ago in fact. I can tell you that Russia has been busy since then. You probably know that apart from oil, gas, gold and diamonds, Russia also has an IT industry.
I hope that you will have a chance to acquaint yourself with some of our most prominent IT companies and people. I know that you host an international programming competition, Facebook Hacker Cup. Speaking of social networking services, they have become extremely popular globally, especially thanks to Facebook. I believe there are 10 million Facebook users in Russia, although this is not as many as in the United States. I have personal account in Facebook, too. I think President Barack Obama already has some 30 million likes on Facebook, but the Russian number is still impressive considering that we also have our own social networking websites, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, not to mention Twitter, which everyone is using. So not bad overall. But the main thing is that we are undoubtedly living in a totally different world, and you have contributed a great deal to that. What are your thoughts on this?
Mark Zuckerberg (via interpreter): Well, it’s an honour to be here so thank you for having invited me. We have done Hacker Cup a few times and one of the reasons why I wanted to come is that this Russian team won it. In general we’ve been really impressed by the quality and talent that we’ve seen, not only from engineers that we work with at Facebook but from developers who make all kinds of social applications outside of Facebook. We wanted to meet them. So one of the big reasons why I’m here is that what we focus on doing as a company is just building the core kind of social platform, but our belief is that there are a lot of other applications and products and those get built by different companies. So while I’m here I’m going to encourage them to help build things on top of Facebook and build some great companies here. And if they can do that then we think it’ll be great for Russian Facebook users.
Dmitry Medvedev: I’m sure you will have some really interesting and productive conversations and meetings. I know that you are going to meet with students of Moscow State University, which is good because I’m sure you are someone they would be very interested to meet. I’m sure they will remember this meeting it always.
I would like to raise one more issue, something I think is very important for the future. I am referring to copyrights and the problem of protecting copyrighted material on theInternet. This is a complicated issue, and I don’t think anyone has any answers just yet – neither the IT community, nor software developers, nor lawyers. In fact, we discussed this in Deauville. It is very important to find a balance between conventional copyright policies and new measures that apply exclusively to theInternet, while at the same time allowing some freedom in the use of copyrighted material online. Striking this balance is a challenge for lawyers, businesses and everyone else involved, including those working with social networks.
I would like to suggest one idea, though: I think that the copyright owner should be able to define the boundaries of copyright protection. If he or she proceeds from a presumption that the copyright item is not specifically limited in use, it should be used freely. I am genuinely interested because I used to work on this problem as a lawyer. What do you think?
Mark Zuckerberg: I think protecting intellectual property is obviously very important, and we invest a huge amount in inventing new things and building new products. We’ve put a lot of protections on Facebook already because we can’t control upfront what people share, nor can any other social network, but what we can do is, if something is protected content then we obviously want to honour that and take those things down immediately. We take this very seriously.
Dmitry Medvedev: I think this is exactly the balance we want to achieve.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yes.
Dmitry Medvedev: Let’s have some coffee.
<…>