On April 23, ahead of World Intellectual Property Day, Russian Intellectual Property Week opened at EPAM Law, featuring two events: a panel discussion titled Significant IP/IT Precedents, and the award ceremony for the winners of the IP&IT LAW 2026 competition, organized by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and IP CLUB.
The events were streamed live on Coordination Center’s official VK page.
Zaurbek Albegonov, Deputy Director of the WIPO Office in the Russian Federation, presented his welcoming remarks, and the discussion was opened by its traditional co-moderators – IP CLUB President, Doctor of Law Marina Rozhkova, and Director of the Coordination Center Andrey Vorobyev.
Participants shared recent digital law cases. For instance, Ilya Khodakov, Senior Associate at ALRUD Law Firm, spoke about the so-called “right to parsing” which consists of automated data extraction from external sources – the timeline of disputes in this area, and the conditions under which parsing would not be deemed copyright or patent infringement.
The presentation by Maria Samartseva, Vice President of IP CLUB, Counsel, and Head of IP & Tech at Dyakin, Gortsunyan & Partners, focused on the high-profile PayQR trademark case, in which Sber acted as the defendant. Alexey Robinov, Senior Partner at the Your Patent intellectual property agency, reported on the progress of the lawsuit filed by the heirs of Vera Mukhina against Mosfilm over the “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” trademarks. Alexandra Bakhtiozina, Counsel at Seven Hills Legal, presented a case concerning a dispute between two jewelry brands, Joser and Sunlight, while Ivan Galkin, Principal Associate of the Intellectual Property and IT Law Practice at Birch Legal, spoke about the SFC vs. Vizio dispute over user modifications to pre-installed software.
Ilya Titov, an associate from the Intellectual Property Protection Practice at the ADVANT Beiten international law firm, concluded the discussion by elaborating on the current trends in domain name disputes in Germany.
Following the discussion, an awards ceremony was held for the winners of the 11th Russian Nationwide Youth Competition on Information Technology and Intellectual Property Law (IP&IT LAW 2026), traditionally organized by IP CLUB and the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
The competition jury reviewed submissions from young researchers from various regions of Russia. The evaluation process included assessing creativity and originality, the thoroughness with which the stated subject was developed, the presence of constructive ideas and proposals, and other established criteria. Having collectively discussed the submitted entries, the jury awarded the IP&IT LAW 2026 prize to the following winners:
- 1st place – Yelena Novitskaya (graduate of MGIMO University) – The right to digital identity amid synthetic content proliferation: A comparative legal analysis;
- 2nd place – Vitaly Yeliseyev (graduate of St Petersburg State University, postgraduate student at Lomonosov Moscow State University) – Algorithmic decision-making for major legal cases;
- 3rd place – Mikhail Kukhno (graduate of HSE University, St Petersburg) – The hardware-software complex in the system of objects of civil rights: Overcoming the dualism of rights in rem and exclusive rights in the circulation of high-tech equipment.
The IP CLUB special nomination was awarded to Angelina Zubareva (graduate of MGIMO University) for her work titled “Copyright limitations in the educational process at educational organizations under Russian and US law.”
In the nomination established by the Association of IP&IT LAW Winners, the special prize was awarded to Konstantin Golubenko (graduate of the Vyacheslav Lebedev Russian State Pedagogical University and Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University) for his work titled “The Procedure for out-of-court cessation of intellectual property infringement by hosting providers: from chaos to legal certainty.”
Winners in the main categories received cash prizes from the Coordination Center, training certificates from the M-Logos Law Institute, a set of popular science publications from ALRUD Law Firm, as well as internship invitations to EPAM Law and the Intellectual Property Court. Winners in the special nominations also received valuable prizes from the organizers and partners of the competition.
All prize winners also received a gift set from SPLAT – a new partner of the IP&IT LAW 2026 competition. According to Maria Olkhovskaya, Ph.D. in Economics, Head of Patent and Inventive Work at SPLAT Global, IP&IT LAW has long transcended the boundaries of a mere competition for young talent:
“Today, the competition is a platform where industry professionals confidently exchange practices, and authors of research papers present a new vision of intellectual property as a key dynamic asset.”
The prize-winning works were recommended for publication in the journals of the Intellectual Property Court and Digital Law.
