A project on the allocation of shares in intellectual property rights has been prepared

A bill on the possibility of allocating shares in the exclusive right to the results of intellectual activity (RIA) in the presence of several rights holders has been introduced to the State Duma. Such a “sharing” will be possible if there is an appropriate agreement. The emergence of the initiative is due to the fact that the plurality of rights holders often leads to disputes between them. The government generally supported the idea, but believed that fragmentation of exclusive rights should be limited. Experts assess the bill differently, noting that its adoption will increase the commercialization of intellectual property, but may lead to problems in their circulation.

Senator Andrei Klishas and State Duma deputy Pavel Krasheninnikov on Wednesday introduced a bill to the State Duma that would enshrine in the Civil Code (C) the possibility of allocating shares in the exclusive right to the results of intellectual activity (RIA). As noted in the explanatory note to the draft, the Civil Code provides for the possibility, by agreement, of disposing of an exclusive right owned jointly by several copyright holders, but does not provide a sufficiently clear answer to the question of whether the allocation of shares is possible, which leads to disputes. The problem is due to the fact that the plurality of copyright holders is quite common, and their interests may not coincide, which can “negatively affect economic processes as a whole, interfering with the use of modern scientific and technical developments.”

The parliamentarians’ bill leaves the prevailing concept of “unity and indivisibility” of the exclusive right, but allows for the possibility of allocating shares if there is an agreement on this between the copyright holders – without it, the general rules of joint ownership of the exclusive right will continue to apply. If the agreement does not provide for a procedure for making decisions on the disposal of intellectual property, then one copyright holder will need the consent of the others to dispose of his share. According to the project, if the RIA is subject to registration, then the allocation of shares must be reflected in the state register (otherwise they are considered unallocated). The shares themselves, as a general rule, are recognized as equal, but a different size can be determined by agreement, and in case of a dispute, by the court.

The government generally supported the idea of ​​the project, but on the condition that it be finalized. In particular, it is necessary to “work through the issues of limiting the fragmentation of the exclusive right, as well as ensuring for persons with a significantly larger share in it the opportunity to counteract the concerted actions of minority co-owners,” since “an excessive number of copyright holders of shares in the exclusive right can lead to difficulties in disposing of this right “

Patent attorney, managing partner of Zuikov and Partners, Sergei Zuikov, believes that the project is extremely relevant: it will be possible to sell or pledge part of the rights, and not the entire object. “Shared ownership of RIAs is a rather radical innovation, and how it will be implemented in practice is not yet entirely clear, but obviously there will be a lot of changes,” he says. LEVEL Legal Services lawyer Nikita Airapetov calls the project quite controversial, since it equally creates both new opportunities for copyright holders to commercialize an exclusive right and problems for civil circulation – for example, when RIA are not subject to registration, the counterparty “cannot always reliably establish the actual ownership exclusive right, and tracking the presence of shares will be even more problematic.”

According to Anastasia Snopkova, a lawyer in the intellectual property and technology practice at BGP Litigation, the allocation of shares “increases the turnover capacity of intellectual property and increases investments in the field of intellectual property,” which is especially important for companies in the high-tech sector. However, she believes, it is worth limiting the splitting of shares during alienation in order to “prevent the cascade effect when one copyright holder sells his share to several persons and they do the same.”

Evgenia Kryuchkova