The Russian Federal Service for Intellectual Property (Rospatent) showed its support for blockchain at the Moscow-hosted international conference titled “Digital Transformation: Intellectual Property and Block-Technology.” Taking place on Monday and Tuesday, the event featured as speakers local and foreign officials, who discussed the application of the distributed ledger technology in the intellectual property (IP) space.
Rospatent head Grigory Ivliev expressed confidence that blockchain would help protect intellectual rights. He said during the conference:
“We see that, with the help of blockchain technologies, it is possible to protect intellectual rights and that the quality of reliability and speed of processes is significantly increased.”
He added that the technology itself could be protected as an object of IP.
Speaking about blockchain-related patents, he revealed that more than one hundred such patents had been issued in Russia.
“The growth of applications is incredible. If last year we examined 18 applications and one patent was given, now we have 285 applications for consideration in this area,” Ivliev added.
The introduction of blockchain technology in the field of copyright will not be easy due to various circumstances, but this task is quite possible, Alexei Kubyshkin, deputy director of the regulatory and legal department of Russia’s Ministry of Culture, was cited as saying during the conference.
“The Internet has contributed to the improvement of the legislation both internationally and nationally, including in the Ministry of Culture of Russia, in terms of mapping new ways of using and distributing copyright and related rights. If businesses and society have a demand for the use of blockchain in the field of intellectual property, then there is no fundamental objection from the Ministry of Culture,” Kubyshkin said, stressing that the ministry is only concerned with the way the technology is implemented.
Other experts voiced the opinion that the lack of a global IP system encourages blockchain adoption. In November 2017, the newly formed Blockchain Patent Sharing Alliance (BPSA) claimed to be the first entity of its kind. BPSA includes organizations from China, the US, and Canada.
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