The Russian copyright law has been amended several times already beginning form 1993. This time, a bill has been introduced in May 2008 to the State Duma aimed at improving protection of intellectual property. In the first place, the amendments are aimed at further bringing the law into conformity with the TRIPS agreement.
In particular, the Bill confimrs allegiance of the Russian Law to the Bern Convention and sets forth that the copyright owners retain the right for remuneration in case of free use of the copyrighted work.
The amendments also rule out the possibility of going unpanished for the persons who provide techniques designed to remove techical means of protection of copyright.
The Bill makes the law conform to TRIPS in that it limits compulsory liensing in respect of semiconductor technologies.
Also, which is even more important, the Bill does not allow the Patent Office to refuse the trademark registration on the basis of an earlier domain name. As is noted in the explanatory note "TRIPS does not attribute the domain name to the protected titles and therefore there are no grounds to cite it against the trademark".
The Civil Code is also being brought in line with the TRIPS Agreement with regard to protection of designations which, though do not include the name of a geographical place, identify nevertheless the object as proceeding from the given territory. According to the Bill the requirements in this case must be the same as for the appellations of origin. |
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