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.