The Chamber of Commerce and Industry hosted a round table "Actual issues of safety and protection of rights to trademarks and other means of individualization", which was held as part of the XIV International Forum "Intellectual Property XXI Century" on April 27.
Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev and Deputy Director of Legal Affairs of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Sergey Kopylov addressed the meeting. Together with their colleagues, they discussed the main changes in the practice of safety and protection of rights to means of individualization over the past year, practical issues of regulating parallel imports and suppressing counterfeit goods, increasing the role of sociological surveys in the practice of protecting rights to means of individualization, developing judicial practice to challenge Rospatent decisions in Intellectual Property Court, countering trademark infringement on the Internet.
“In litigation for the right to own a particular domain name, priority is given to right holders - more than 80% of domain disputes are resolved in their favor. At the same time, 20% of disputes are still resolved in favor of domain administrators,” – Andrey Vorobyev said. At the same time, the Director of the Coordination Center noted that in the Russian Federation there are no existing procedures for resolving disputes about the relationship between domain names and trademarks that are alternative to litigation. And in cases where such a dispute arose, and the parties could not resolve their differences during negotiations, litigation is inevitable.
The experts of the Coordination Center explained that in accordance with the Domain Name Registration Rules in the .RU and .РФ domains, the user (domain administrator) is solely responsible for the choice of a domain name and for possible violations of the rights of third parties related to the choice and registration of a domain name, as well as bears the risk of loss associated with such violations.
Sergey Kopylov told patent attorneys and IP protection specialists about the services of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, which help to prevent "domain disputes" even at the stage of domain registration. “Nowadays, the best preventive protection of your trademark on the Internet is the deliberate registration of similar domain names to the right holder (defensive registration),” the expert concluded.
It should be reminded that the annual forum "Intellectual Property - XXI Century" is organized by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation, timed to coincide with the International Day of Intellectual Property (April 26), which is held by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
