Style protection, unitary patent for the EEC and other relevant issues of intellectual property protection

The company "Zuykov and partners" acted as the General partner of the conference "Intellectual property: key changes, key cases" held April 11 at the MARRIOTT Hotel in Novy Arbat in Moscow.

The rapid development of digital technology influences on issues concerning the intellectual property protection. Surrounding world is changing so quickly, that sometimes, the Federal and regional legislation are not catching this process. In this sense, jurisprudence is much more flexible and responsive tool to react to changes in conditions.

Conference "Intellectual property: key changes, key cases" has provided an opportunity for the professional community to discuss the latest trends and most relevant issues of intellectual property protection in Russia and in the Eurasian Economic Union.

The value and importance of this event was, including the fact that the speakers and participants were not only lawyers of private firms, patent attorneys but also the officials from the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) and the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), etc.

The conference was opened with a session devoted to strategy of development of intellectual property legislation in the Russian Federation, moderated by Sergey Zuykov, Director General of the company "Zuykov and partners". Within its framework the head of Department of control of advertising and unfair competition FAS of Nikolay Kartashov told about new provisions of the legislation on unfair competition, the forms of which have allocated in separate Chapter of the Federal law "On protection of competition" and that the Russian law system  supplemented by a number of foreign borrowings. So, in the legislation new terms as "discredit", "incorrect comparison" and "confusion" were added.

Irina Klishina, Deputy Head of Department of organization of granting state services Rospatent, in her speech also paid attention to the changes of the current legislation, focusing on issues of disposal of exclusive right to intellectual property, in particular on the fact that commercial firms are prohibited to dispose of such rights free of charge.

The Head of Department for industrial designs subordinated to Rospatent, FIPS Ivan Kashkur told about the innovations in industrial design registration: in order to define the scope of intellectual property rights in the product, no longer need to make a sketch, but rather to provide high-quality pictures of the industrial design to be registered.

The adviser of Department of protection of the rights of intellectual property of Department of business development of the EEC, Ekaterina Myasnikova told about the changes in legislation which should appear. The most interesting among it is the draft "Treaty on trademarks, service marks and appellations of origin of goods the Eurasian economic Union", which provide trademark protection in all member States of the EEU.

Sergey Zuykov, Director General of the company "Zuykov and partners", devoted his speech to the review of jurisprudence on intellectual property for the year 2016 and the point of how it has changing the Russian legislation. Sergey Zuykov paid special attention on the decision of the Constitutional Court about the possibility of reducing the amount of compensation for copyright infringement below statutory minimum limit in case the infringement is committed for the first time, if it was not of a gross nature and the compensation is many times bigger the size of the caused to the right holder damages. In addition, Sergei Zuykov said that now the court in its discretion allows to change the method of calculating compensation, as happened in the case № A60-14066/2016.

The second part of the conference was dedicated to the court practice for the intellectual property and patents for the last year and topical issues of intellectual property protection in our country.

Head of IP/TMT, KSK Group Anton Gorodetsky has told about the disputes around domain names and their protection, which is complicated due to the fact that the legislation does not regulate this question, and the court practice is contradictory.

Speech of Anton Drusina, Head of Department of protection of intellectual ownership of PepsiCo holdings, was devoted to early termination of the validity of trademarks in non-use. Boris Malakhov, Senior lawyer of Lidings practice for intellectual property protection drew attention to how it was after the entry into force of the fourth Antimonopoly package-by "signature style" and that under this concept implies the law.

Boris Gerasin, the expert of IT-sector in Patent practice in Center for intellectual property "SKOLKOVO", Kirill Laptev, Senior associate at Sorainen and Oleg Abramenko, Managing partner in PATENT IT in their speeches summed up the problems of protection of the rights to IT projects and gave advice to startups: firstly clearly articulate the technical problem and the results of its decisions, and secondly,  describe more examples of the invention and allow the maximum possible number of explanatory drawings.