Round Table Discussion was Held on the Topic “Improving the Provisions of the Civil Code of the Republic of Belarus on Intellectual Property”

A round-table discussion on the topic “Improving the Provisions of the Civil Code of the Republic of Belarus on Intellectual Property”, organized by the Permanent Commission of the Council of the Republic on Legislation and State Building, was held via videoconferencing on April 23, 2020.

Members of the Council of the Republic, representatives of the National Center of Legislation and Legal Research, National Center of Intellectual Property, Ministry of Economics, High Court of the Republic of Belarus, legal community, experts took part in the discussion. 

The round-table discussion was opened by Mr. Victor Chaychits, Deputy Chairman of the Permanent Commission of the Council of the Republic on Legislation and State Building, who outlined the necessity to discuss a problematic issues, arising while creating and using intellectual property rights, as well as prospects of further improvement of legislation in the sphere of intellectual property.

Mr. Sergey Losev, Leading Researcher of the Department of Research in the field of Civil, Environmental and Social Law of the Institute of Legal Studies of the National Center of Legislation and Legal Research, PhD in Law, Associate Professor, in his speech provided the main provisions of the new version of Section V “Intellectual Property” of the Civil Code of the Republic of Belarus.

The issues of the enforcement practice of intellectual property law were addressed in the report of the judge of the Judicial Board for Intellectual Property of the Supreme Court Oleg Latyshevich, problematic issues of improving the Civil Code were the reported by Natalia Novikova, Deputy Head of the Legal and Human Resources Department of the National Center of Intellectual Property.

The active participation in the discussion of the provisions of the draft law, which amends the Civil Code, was taken by the lecturers of the universities of the Republic of Belarus. Anna Borschevskaya, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Legal Disciplines of the Mogilev Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, suggested that trade secrets be included in the list of intellectual property rights, and Natalya Nagornaya, Senior Lecturer of this Department, suggested to amend the Civil Code with norms on informational intermediation.

Associate Professor of the Department of Civil Law, Faculty of Law, BSU, Ph.D. (Law), Diana Ivanova noted the need to optimize a number of articles in Section 5 of the Civil Code, as well as clarify the concepts of a license agreement and an assignment agreement on exclusive rights.

Representatives of the Law Faculty of the Polotsk State University addressed the issues of codification of intellectual property legislation (Vladimir Bogonenko, Head of the Civil Law Department, candidate of legal sciences, associate professor), legal protection of multimedia works (Kristina Savitskaya, Senior Lecturer of the Civil Law Department). Oksana Golubeva, Dean of the University’s Faculty of Information Technology, Ph.D. touched upon the issues of protection of rights to computer programs.

Avak Vartanyan, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Law, Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno, PhD in Law, Associate Professor proposed clarifying the rules of Article 982 of the Civil Code on economic and personal moral rights to intellectual property.

The discussion revolved around new version of Article 1018 of the Civil Code on the term of validity of a trademark certificate. According to the draft, its validity period is ten years and is calculated from the date of receipt of the application by the patent office. The Deputy Director of the LLC “Lekspatent”, the patent attorney of the Republic of Belarus Galina Vashuk and the lawyer of the Minsk Regional Bar Association Angela Ratner suggested talking about the validity of the exclusive rights, and not the validity of the certificate, since the exclusive right is primary in relation to the person certifying this right to the document.

Summing up the round-table discussion, Viktor Chaychits drew attention to a wide range of problems that were discussed during the event, and invited all interested to send proposals to the Standing Committee aimed at improving the Civil Code in the sphere of intellectual property. 

“All proposals will be accumulated by us together with the National Center of Legislation and Legal Research and, if possible, taken into account when working on the draft law, including after it will be submitted to the Parliament”, — Viktor Chaychits emphasized.

Source – Council of the Republic of the National Assembly of the Republic of Belarus (http://www.sovrep.gov.by/ru/)