'Parallel Importing' a Theory & Practice Seminar at the Statute School of Law

Laboratory Chief Alexey Ivanov presented a special report.

On February 18th, a theoretical and practical roundtable discussion was held on the topic of parallel importation. The session was held by the Statute School of Law, the Russian School of Private Law, the Alekseev Private Law Research Center, the Journal of Arbitration Practice, together with a representative of the Office of the Ombudsman of the Russian Federation, on the topic of the protection of the rights of entrepreneurs in the field of intellectual property.

 

The discussion panelists were School of Private Law instructors, Alekseev Center researchers, representatives of the HSE-Skolkovo International Laboratory for Law and Development, representatives of the Supreme Court, the Court of Intellectual Property Rights, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Economic Development, the Federal Tax Service, the Federal Customs Service, the Eurasian Economic Commission, and enterprise associations.

 

Special deliveries were made by head of the HSE-Skolkovo Law Laboratory Alexey Ivanov, and Anatoli Semenov of the Office of the Ombudsman.

 

The laboratory has long been engaged in research addressing the issue of the exhaustion of exclusivity rights to intellectual property in the Russian market, a topic of interest as it gives rise to the problem of managing parallel imports, and the issue of the presence of non-counterfeit 'grey products' on the market. Given rigourous analysis and the expert opinion of the Laboratory and team, the position was advanced categorically that liberalisation of the current regime of exhaustion should be called for.

 

The Laboratory recently announced the results of a study conducted for the Eurasian Economic Commission on the choice of system for exhaustion of IP rights in the context of the obligations of international law and WTO rules. The experts concluded that, although WTO law does not clearly define a system of exhaustion, it proposes barriers and limitations regulating world trade, which directly invokes the concept of clear assumptions for the treatment of parallel imports.