On April 18, Moscow hosted a conference titled “Intellectual Property – 2024” organized by Pravo.ru, a leading Russian legal news outlet. The event brought together top industry experts to analyse the current legal practices and discuss the latest trends in intellectual property (IP) protection.
Maria Samartseva, Counsel at the IP litigation practice of the law firm Rybalkin, Gortsunyan, Dyakin and Partners (RGD), moderated a session titled “The latest technology trends: IP management in the digital space.” Maria spoke in detail about the division and inheritance of social media accounts.
Intellectual property and related digital technologies together form a comparatively new institution from the legal point of view. Maria started by revealing the core difference between the terms “Profile” and “Account”. Thus, the social network pages (including channels, communities, pages, publics) are profiles as they have a public focus. But users' personal pages on websites, online and email services (not used to publish news, texts, adverts, etc.) are considered to be accounts. In addition, Maria explained the key functions of a profile and the factors that affect its value and worth, as well as its potential to be subject to inheritance or partition.
Today, profiles in Russia can be inherited under certain conditions, and identified as digital assets as an item of intellectual property. Maria also talked about inheritance in some EU countries and the USA.
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Rybalkin, Gortsunyan, Dyakin and Partners (RGD), a leading law firm established in 2018, which combines a premier dispute resolution practice and a high-end corporate practice dedicated to complex projects and transactions.
From our offices in Moscow, Yerevan, Tashkent, Belgrade, Dubai, and Ras Al Khaimah we support clients from all over the world in their business dealings in our key practice areas involving Russia and CIS countries. In addition, our firm offers unparalleled expertise in foreign legal matters to Russian companies with significant international presence.
We are a cohesive team of seasoned professionals with a background in leading international law firms.
Our lawyers have worked on the largest corporate deals, investigations and disputes in the history of modern Russia and represented Russian companies in over 170 jurisdictions worldwide.
Contact person:
Maria Bannova
mbannova@rgd.legal
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