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The Council of the European Union issued Regulation No 2024/1745 on June 24, 2024 concerning restrictive measures in view of Russia’s actions destabilizing the situation in Ukraine. We familiarized ourselves with that 14th package of restrictive measures against Russia and would like to make comments as follow:

The restrictive measures concern intellectual property among other things. Thus, Section (20) reads that The Russian Government and Russian courts have been undertaking actions to illegitimately deprive Member State intellectual property rights holders of their protection in Russia….

In order to assess the above provision it is necessary to recall a document earlier adopted by The European Commission in 2022. At that time the Commission issued “The Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation”. It reads in its Preamble: (b) The Signatories recognize and agree with the European Commission’s conclusions that "[t]he exposure of citizens to large scale Disinformation, including misleading or outright false information, is a major challenge for Europe,” and that “[o]ur open democratic societies depend on public debates that allow well-informed citizens to express their will through free and fair political processes".

Now, let us see how the above Section 20 tallies with the Strengthened Code of Practice

Section 20 alleges that IP owners are illegitimately deprived of protection of their rights in Russia.

So, what happened in the period of 2022 to 2024? There was one case in 2022 where the Russian court refused to protect the rights of an “unfriendly” British company (the case of Peppa Pig) but that judgment was overturned by higher court and there have been no trademark cases against foreign IP owners from “unfriendly” countries since then.

Patents: during the Covid pandemic Russian government sought a license from a US patent owner to treat Covid. The patent owner dismissed the request so the government allowed the use of a couple of their patents and allowed production and use of a medicine to two Russian producers with a moderate compensation. When the war in the Ukraine started the government nullified the compensation. That permission was limited in time and expired when the Covid was over. That “0” compensation was widely publicized by the media including in Russia but when it was cancelled in March 2024 not a single source uttered a word about the cancellation decree.

It should be noted that the use of patents without permission of the patent owner is allowed by TRIPS Article 31 in extreme urgency which was the case in Russia in 2020 – 2022.

The above two cases (a trademark and patents) triggered a wave of false information across the world in 2022 which was countered by a series of our articles explaining the real situation. As a result, the wave of false information subsided for a while.

It is worth quoting another passage from Section 20 above: “… This (illegitimate deprivation) has resulted in an undue competitive advantage for the Russian industry and contributed to Russia’s revenues, further enabling it to wage war in Ukraine.

Also Q&A to the 14th package: “Russia is on the offensive on depriving protection of intellectual property rights of our companies in Russia. Russia wants to get hold of Union industrial know-how, which is the result of R&D investments. It does that to localise production and cut economic dependency on the EU and ultimately neutralising sanctions.

Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite: foreign companies indeed curtailed their filing activity in Russia. This prompted Russian companies to search published patent applications in foreign countries and use the technologies disclosed therein since they are not protected in Russia. As for registered patents and trademarks they are fully protected and enforced when necessary.

We hope IP practitioners in Europe will take note of the current IP situation in Russia and perceive statements in the 14th package cum grano salis.