On July 4 a lecture and seminar discussing problems of intellectual property was conducted at the Hypercube.
The audience and participants were presented by lawyers of Skolkovo Foundation’s partner companies as well as students of the summer school on cyber law of the Higher School of Economics – post-graduates and young professionals from all regions of Russia and foreign countries – Belgium, France, Slovakia, India, Britain. Lecturers of the scientific-educational lab on information law and employees of the Department of Intellectual Property of the Higher School of Economics took active part in the discussions.
The main theme of the discussion was the topic of intellectual property as a key element for innovative development, one of the most complex topics of public law. Skolkovo Foundation is the leading expert venue for discussion and preparation of legislative initiatives for the protection and monetization of intellectual assets. In many ways this is thanks to the unique experience of the Skolkovo Center of Intellectual Property (CIP). Besides, it is under the leadership of the Foundation specialists that a long-term strategy on intellectual property of the Russian Federation is being developed. And relatively recently, in May, a joint research of Skolkovo and HSE, “Intellectual Property and Society Development: Time for Pragmatics” was published.
The seminar was opened by Vitaliy Kastalskiy, general director of the Skolkovo Center of Intellectual Property who began his talk with a short summary about the activities and goals of Skolkovo and the resume of CIP. Descriptions of the Center’s projects drew a lot of interest – Vitaliy was bombarded with questions. But the most valuable information according to the audience – “simply gold” as one listener said – were court cases in patent law which Vitaliy presented to the participants offering them to take the role of the judge and come up with possible decisions.
The director on collaboration with state authorities of the department of legal policy and social development Maxim Proksh spoke about the most dynamic, “pulsing” sector, in which entire sections of regulation require review and correction – namely, the Internet. Today there are more questions than answers in this sphere, that’s why it is so important to apply effective mechanisms for multilateral consultations with all parties – state, users, internet companies, and content owners who distribute content on the internet.
Skolkovo’s session dedicated to intellectual property was closed by the Director of Department of legal policy and social development Alexey Ivanov. His lecture addressed the issue of “Transformation of global regime of intellectual property: possibilities and risks”. Alexey touched upon a whole range of directions: review of approaches to assess the effect of a particular regime of intellectual property rights on the back of the needs of the country; engagement of new actors in resolving of intellectual property issues; mechanisms for the emergence of innovation (the fact of their suddenness, “inability to be planned”) and the principles of Open Access; issues of essential contradiction existing between the necessity to protect the rights of inventors on the one side and limitation of competition by rights owners on the other.