On April 28, the Russian State Academy of Intellectual Property (RSAIP) hosted an offsite meeting of the Committee on Intellectual Property of the Coordination Center for TLD.RU/РФ. The meeting was part of the All-Russian Intellectual Property Week, held in major Russian cities on April 24-28. Its agenda focused on how to protect intellectual property in domain names and the role of registrars and domain registries in handling domain-related disputes.
The meeting was attended by Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD.RU/РФ; his deputy Sergei Kopylov, head of the center’s law department; Mikhail Anisimov, head of the advertising and marketing department of the Technical Center of Internet (TCI); and Anton Sergo, RSAIP professor and head of the intellectual property committee at the Coordination Center.
Sergei Kopylov spoke about the role and opportunities of registrars and information brokers. He noted that, judging by the nature of Internet addressing, a registrar cannot be recognized as an information broker.
Anton Sergo took a look at recent domain-related lawsuits and how they were handled in court, and compared the approaches suggested by the Civil Code of the Russian Federation and the UDRP to settling domain name disputes. “In Russian legal practice, the UDRP principles are applied both to trademarks (in keeping with the WIPO practice) and to brand names,” he said.
Coordination Center Director Andrey Vorobyev spoke about how the newly emerged TLDs from .cat (Catalonia) to .MOSCOW and .МОСКВА were created, about the problem of geographical names in TLDs and how to protect them, and about the experience of registering .ru names containing “Sochi” during preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in compliance with the federal law on protecting the Olympic emblem.
Mikhail Anisomov of the TCI dwelled on the operation principles used in the Domain Name System (DNS) and the role of DNS registries both in national domains and TLDs. He stressed that the DNS is a globally distributed database with each of its segments governed by different organizations and parties concerned.
Attending the meeting, apart from members of the Committee on Intellectual Property, were students and postgraduate students of the RSAIP Department of Copyright, Related Rights and Private Law, who took an active part in the discussion.
