New legal approaches to intellectual property protection

Nikolai Kartashov was a speaker at a conference organized by Pravo.ru

On 11 April 2017, the Conference “Intellectual Property: Key Changes, Main Cases” in Moscow opened with a presentation by Head of FAS Department or Control over Advertising and Unfair Competition, Nikolai Kartashov, on legal approaches to intellectual property protection through the antimonopoly law and  the current FAS practice in this filed.

FAS representative reminded that the new version of the Law “On Protection of Competition” in the part on unfair competition has been in force for already a year: the structure of legal remedies against unfair competition using exclusive rights has been reviewed considerably. At the same time, according to the speaker, “the provisions of the new Chapter 2.1 of the Law, including the conceptual framework, approximate the Russian act on competition protection with the European practice of antimonopoly enforcement.

Nikolai Kartashov reminded of the established legal approaches of FAS based on the key antimonopoly cases. For instance, he described an unfair competition case upon the fact of registering “Antigrippin” trademark. In this context Nikolai Kartashov pointed out that “it is exactly this practice that formed the basis for clarifying the list of unfair competition forms in the Law “On Protection of Competition””.

The audience was especially interested in the latest examples of FAS applying the new provisions of the Chapter on unfair competition, particularly, the confusion institution, illustrated with the recent cases investigated by the Central FAS Office and regional bodies.