Dmitry Uryakin analysed for Novy Prospect the situation with countrfeit toys in Russia
South Korean company ROI VISUAL, which owns the rights to the trademark of Robokar Poli (a children’s cartoon series), has filed lawsuits against 11 individual entrepreneurs from St Petersburg who sell toys. The amounts of claims range from 10,000 to 120,000 rubles. Since 2019, the company has been actively fighting against the distribution of counterfeit products in the Russian Federation. Experts rate ROI VISUAL’s chances of successfully solving court disputes as high. Experts also note a growing trend in the number of trademark protection lawsuits and in the escalation of the problem of counterfeit toys turnover in Russia.
Dmitry Uryakin, Lawyer at Maxima Legal, confirmed to Novy Prospect that ROI VISUAL has a good chance of winning the courts in St Petersburg. “In most such disputes, the court has sided with them. I do not think that this time there will be a different result,” – said the expert.
Analyzing the situation with protection of rights for trademarks, Dmitry calculated that during the last year alone, the courts handed down over 400 decisions in disputes regarding protection of the rights of characters from the cartoon ” Masha and the Bear”. More than 800 court decisions in disputes over cartoon characters from the Peppa Pig cartoon and more than 500 decisions in disputes over cartoon characters from the animated film Fixiki.
“Such a significant number of cases shows a pejorative attitude to other people’s intellectual property in our country and also highlights a certain inefficiency of judicial protection of infringed intellectual property rights, which is largely due to the amount of compensation that the courts recover. If an infringer understands that in the worst case he will have to pay 50 thousand roubles for selling someone else’s toy and will gain substantially more profit from illegal activities, he will have no doubt about committing an offence,” – the specialist explained.
According to Dmitry Uryakin, the share of counterfeit goods may decrease only if the courts will stop reducing the amount of compensation to the value of the counterfeit toy and begin to collect court costs from offenders in a substantial amount, without reducing them to the notorious “reasonable limits”. “And legal fees for copyright holders who are fighting for their rights should not be more than the amount of compensation awarded to them. But so far this is the case,” – the expert concluded.
To read the full article (in Russian) please visit Novy Prospect website >>>