The RIF 2019 forum is underway, and on its second day, the award ceremony took place for the winners of the 2019 IP&IT LAW, the fourth Russian youth contest for information technology and intellectual property law (IP&IT LAW). The competition was organized by IP CLUB together with the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ with support from the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications.
First place was awarded to Yelena Shcherbakova, a first-year student at the Higher School of Economics, for her entry, Big Data: The Issues of Lawful Use. Oleg Ksenofontov, who graduated from the Higher School of Economics in 2018, took second place. His work is entitled E-Commerce: Aspects of Legal Regulation of Targeted Advertising in Russia. Third place went to Sergei Shutkin, first-year master’s student at Lomonosov Moscow State University, for the paper The Legal Status of the Results of AI’s Creative Activity. All winners received certificates from the State Duma committee, as well as electronics, invitations to relevant seminars, and prizes from the organizers and sponsors. Yelena Shcherbakova, who won the competition, was invited to do an internship at the Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners law firm.
Shcherbakova was also awarded the special prize of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The award was presented to the IT&IP Law winners in 2017 and 2018.
Another contest participant, Ivan Krylov, received special recognition for the number of points his submission earned. The third-year student at Moscow State University’s Law School won a prize for his work The Legal Regulation of Robo-Advising.
The awards and prizes were presented by jury chair and IP CLUB President Marina Rozhkova and Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev. “You are getting drawn into the IT&IP Law contest; it grows on you. Many young people take part in it every year, and second-place winner Oleg Ksenofontov was among the winners of the first IT&IP Law contest in 2016. It is great that the industry attracts young lawyers who are truly interested in our cases and hopefully will work with us in the future,” Andrey Vorobyev said.
The second day of the forum also included a traditional closed meeting of the leadership and representatives of the Coordination Center and the Technical Center of Internet with accredited registrars of domain names and experts from competent organizations. Participants in the meeting discussed interaction between registrars and the Coordination Center, as well as planned amendments to the regulations and technical improvements. Employees of the Coordination Center and the Technical Center of Internet answered registrars’ questions about the domain registration rules and legal assistance, and spoke about the two organizations’ plans for 2019-2020. All registrars were presented with commemorative postage stamps issued to mark the anniversary of the .RU domain. The ceremony to cancel the stamps took place at RIGF 2019 (https://rigf.ru/) on April 8.
