The course on human capital

24.05.2019

In April, the 2nd International Strategic Forum on Intellectual Property IPQuorum 2019 was held in the Kaliningrad Region. And if last year IPQuorum discussed mostly the possibilities of using blockchain technology in the field of intellectual property, this time the participants focused on the topic of human capital as a key resource of the modern economy.

The IPQuorum Intellectual Property Forum was organized by IPChain Association, the Confederation of Rightholders’ Societies of Europe and Asia (CRSEA) and the Intellectual Property Federation. At the Forum last year, representatives of IPChain Association talked a lot about the capabilities of the IPChain infrastructure, a distributed intellectual property registry. Now the event has managed to prove the effectiveness of how blockchain technology helps in building a transparent and functional intellectual property market. The first results of cooperation between the association and its partners were also summed up. For example, at the end of the year, an outstanding event for the Russian sphere of intellectual property took place: the Intellectual Property Rights Court began to post its transactions on the IPChain network. Since disputes about the ownership of intellectual property are ongoing, court decisions posted on the blockchain network greatly simplify the work of market participants and allow them to instantly find out about their status.

This desire of the judicial system to simplify the life of businesses is uncommon. According to Anna Kostyra, Managing Partner at Deloitte Legal CIS, one of the most important problems for commercial companies in Russia remains the desire of the state to regulate digital markets. With any appearance of new technologies in the Internet environment, the state is trying to create a regulatory environment before which the commercialization of such technologies becomes virtually outside the legal field, despite the fact that the civil law principle “everything is permitted that is not forbidden” has not been canceled, concludes Ms. Kostyra.

According to her, IPChain will definitely interest the business, if the platform will give an option to record the right fast and for an adequate price. Such a need exists not only for companies that register patents and trademarks, but also for representatives of creative industries, for example, musicians and video bloggers. Content creators do not want to plunge into the specifics of licensing and rights management, “it’s easier for them to click on the screen and forget about studying the contents of the papers,” said Valery Drobysh, CEO at StartUp Music label.

Among the incentives for switching to blockchain in Russia, IPQuorum participants called, among other things, the opportunity to get rid of paperwork. The technology allows you to certify documents using private keys, that is, to conclude contracts you do not even need a separate electronic signature..

Another problem that the intellectual property market hopes to solve with the help of blockchain is piracy. According to Sergei Semenov, legal adviser at the Association of Film and Television Producers, the Yandex anti-piracy memorandum adopted late last year is ineffective, because as soon as the search engine agrees to remove some pirated links from the search results, others go up immediately. On IPChain, you can create “white lists” of legal resources. “If any site hosts a video or music illegally, this fact will be displayed on the blockchain. And the content of authors using IPChain cannot be placed illegally at all,” the lawyer said.

The head of the IPEX project, Artem Tovbin, believes that services are being built on the IPChain infrastructure that solve all the challenges in the field of copyright related to technology. The IPEX platform, the prototype of which IPChain released at the end of 2018, will soon work as an intellectual property exchange and will allow you to conclude transactions of any complexity with intellectual property.

Participants of IPQuorum reiterated the importance of the field of intellectual property in the context of transition to digital economy and its successful growth in Russia. Andrei Krichevsky, President of IPChain Association, emphasized that only in our country it was possible to create an infrastructure, through which market participants can easily interact with each other. The problem of intellectual property is especially important for the regions that practically do not make money on natural resources. The Kaliningrad region also belongs to such regions, recalled the Governor Anton Alikhanov. “Kaliningrad does not have oil, gas or potassium salts, like Perm, for example. Therefore, we will strive to introduce mechanics of the regulatory sandbox, including in such areas as blockchain and intellectual property management,” he concluded.