Gennady Voskresensky

    The Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, intends to start forming a legal base that will secure �putting objects of intellectual property as well as industrial projects in civil circulation�. In an interview with Eurasian Metals the Council’s member and chairman of its committee on science, culture, education, health care and ecology Vladimir Nikitov explained the reasons for legislators’ attention to this question:
– As is known, protection of intellectual property in Russia is regulated by the Constitution, Civil Code, Patent Law and a whole number of other normative and legal acts. The important role in this belongs to laws «On copyright and related rights», «On trademarks, service marks and designation of places of product origin», «On legal protection of computer programs and databases». Their passage contributed to the recognition of Russia by the international community as an equal entity in this area.
However, the law enforcement is getting more complicated. One can already see quite a few serious legal gaps in protecting intellectual property. For example, the existing legal base does not stimulate inventive, innovation, scientific and production activity as well as practical use of its results in the economy. The State does not have rights de jure on projects of industrial property implemented earlier or being implemented at present with state budget funds. Due to the absence of legally established procedure to license and estimate the cost of industrial property it is impossible to effectively control the process of assigning rights on projects implemented with state funds. Legal relations remain unregulated in such an important area as employee’s and secret inventions. The procedure of patenting Russian inventions abroad is not sufficiently regulated, as no sanctions are provided for its violation. In fact, there are no standards for monitoring registration and transfer of Russian technologies abroad. And this list of such legal flaws may go on.
So far there are no federal laws in Russia dealing with secret inventions, employee’s inventions and commercial classified information. Experts believe that legal regulations should be concentrated on relations concerning inventions, which are based on data qualified as state secrets. It is essential that the right for using a secret invention be restricted during the period of classifying. Regulations of patent legal protection in Russia still deny the State an exclusive right to secret inventions giving this right to patent’s owner instead. As a result, the state national and economic security suffers a considerable damage.
The experience of high-tech industries proves that the absence of a federal law on secret inventions has a rather negative impact on their intellectual property as well as on results of enterprises’ activities. There are such laws in the U.S., Germany, Italy and other developed countries and they are successfully applied. The analysis of international laws makes it possible to speed up work on proper normative and legal acts in Russia.
The law «On secret inventions» has been drafted. It might be used as a basis of a federal law. By order of the Russian government this draft will be introduced to the State Duma (the lower house of the parliament).
Also, there is still no law in Russia on service facilities of industrial property and because of this there are problems with projects of industrial property implemented with funds of customer and employer. Such relations in other countries are regulated by laws. For example, there is a law on employee’s inventions in Germany, under which payment of compensations to all inventors is done by the single rules.

There is no legal basis in Russia for a state support of individual inventors. If article 9 on «Federal fund of Russia’s inventions» is deleted from the Patent law – and this has been discussed for a long time now – then, there will be a need to work out a draft law on state support of individual inventors taking into account the foreign experience.
So as to settle such problems once and for all, experts urge to work out as a top priority a whole number of draft laws, including «On secret inventions», «On employee’s inventions», «On commercial classified information», «On state support of individual inventors», «On unfair competition», etc. As is expected, legislators will get down to debating them during the current fall/winter session of the national parliament.