News date: 17 April 2019
Murad Akhmedov, an intellectual property attorney at Ilyashev & Partners Law Firm, delivered a speech entitled “Draft laws in IP. What initiatives does modern IP law need?” at the conference “Intellectual Property – 2019”, which was held on 16 April 2019 in Moscow.
In his report Murad Akhmedov described the contradictions existing in the copyright legal protection of computer software. He drew a parallel between Russian precedents and the American case Computer Associates International Inc. v. Altai Inc. of 1992. In this dispute, the court proposed its own methodology – a three-step test (known as the AFC-test, or Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test): in the first stage, the court should distinguish between the ideas contained in the program from their objective expression, in the second stage – to perform “Filtration”, separate the program code from elements which are not legally protectable by copyright, and the third step is to compare the forms of expression of two programs, excluding the elements selected during the filtration stage from the comparison. And only if further to this the court finds a significant similarity, it will acknowledge the existence of violation.
Comparing this approach to the one applied in the Russian legal practice Murad pointed out:
“The approach stipulated by the Civil Code contains only the reference to protection of computer programs by copyright. This is not enough, and the courts are compelled to somehow weasel their way out in order to protect the party which they think is in the right. Now the courts just follow the expert opinion. It would be advisable to introduce certain amendments to the legislation, considering for the particularities of computer programs distinguishing them from other objects of copyright”.
Murad Akhmedov acted as a moderator of the forum’s sessions at which the matters of competition, protection of IP rights and fighting counterfeit products, IP development in the company and court disputes were discussed.
“Pravo.ru” organizes special-purpose conferences for lawyers, executives and employees of law firms, representatives of financial and judiciary bodies.