Russian Patents Blog

As I’ve just facebooked and twittered (is it the word anyway?), propmted by a call from fellow patent attorney from India I managed to update our Trademark registration in Russia page. In particular, I added a Chinese, a Korean and a Mexican trademarks to our Wall of trademark applications we’ve filed in Russia recently – as I call it to myself…I love the look, can’t wait to see it growing up to 100 cute tiny pics:)

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Here is another matter we touched in email correspondence with our client, which I believe might be of interest to others.

Our client wrote:

Q: I have prepared an Intellectual Property Licence Agreement for my client from UK. It is proposed that a licence will be granted to a Russian company which will be for a business venture in Socci. The Agreement is in English. The Licensee will probably get legal advice in Russia and issues relating to Russian law may arise.. And I don’t know whether a translation of the Agreement will be required.

Do you do work of this nature?

A: Yes, we can do it. First, the Agreement can be signed not sooner than after the date of the registration – this is not available yet (but should be soon). Second, it does require to be translated in to Russian – we’ll have to submit three copies of the executed bilingual agreement to Rospatent, and pay fees.

Q: Is registration a prerequisite to achieving enforceability of the IP licence in Russia?

A: Yes.

Q: With regard to the translation, what happens if there is a discrepancy between the two versions? Can we include a provision which says that the English language version will prevail in the event of any inconsistency between the two versions?

A: You can do that, I think it will not prevent registration of the agreement in Rospatent, but as in the case of judicial
trial what court will decide, I do not know.

Q: Can we choose the jurisdiction and the applicable law?

A: Russian trademark will be only valid on the territory of the Russian Federation. What might be other jurisdictions? Legal relations connected with the Russian trademark will be governed by Russian legislation.

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As I’ve mentioned on this blog previously, among other things we’re involved with there is a document delivery service – that’s basically delivery of Russian patents and articles from Russian scientific journals. However, from time to time we were asked to deliver articles from non-Russian journals, and, surprisingly (for us in the first place…), success rate was about 95%.

During last year I’d been trying to collect document delivery requests data into a Excel file, and while I had some spare time during the holidays I analyzed collected data and revealed interesting facts I’m going to publish:

Total number of document delivery requests: 103
Requests for Russian articles: 34
Requests for non-Russian articles: 69 (that’s TWICE as much as compared with Russian articles, hmm…)
Average number of requests for document delivery: 9 per month
(BUT in December only we received 27 requests)

Top 3 foreign (that is non-Russian) articles requests:
18 Poland
10 Romania
8 Czech

Full list of foreign (that is non-Russian) articles delivery requests we fulfilled in 2009:
18 Poland
10 Romania
8 Czech
5 Croatia
4 Greece
3 Bulgaria
3 Serbia
3 Turkey
2 Slovakia
2 Ukraine
1 Armenia
1 Azerbajzhan
1 Belarus
1 Georgia
1 Germany
1 Hungary
1 Italia
1 Lithuania
1 Slovenia
1 Uzbekistan

Quite often we have to deal with insufficient data in citations. Here is few examples I’d like to share with you:

1. My patron wrote:
“I can’t locate the publication name so I am unable to determine the publication location. Is this something that you may be able to obtain?”
The publication in question was “Byul. Izobret. i Tovarnykh Znakov”. For me it was immediately clear that it’s in fact Official Gazette of the Russian patent office (“Byulleten’ Izobretenii i Tovarnykh Znakov” in full). So apparently it was a patent my patron was after – but it’s number was not available. Luckily, I knew year and title – so I could search the document in Russian patent database and locate few patents matching the criteria, and one of them was the necessary one.

2. My patron requested an article from journal titled “Chirurgia (Bucuresti)“. There were given all usual details – author, title, year, journal’s issue, pages – and previously I successfully delivered few articles from this very journal, so I went to check the necessary issue of the journal. But to my surprise, there was no such article published in this issue. I proceeded with search throughout entire archive of the journal – to no avail, such an article (and I tried concatenated title as well) was not found. I tried then to look it up by author – same result, search brought no matches. Hmm…so I had to do a bibliography search of my own, and it turned out that the citation was incorrect – the journal was not Romanian one (Chirurgia (Bucuresti), but instead it was an Italian journal with similar name:

CHIRURGIA
A Journal on Surgery
P.ISSN 0394-9508

Having found the correct citation, I was able to deliver requested article.

3. My patron asked to obtain a copy of an article published in a Russian newspaper. Data was sufficient – date, title, newspaper’s name, etc. – and even online archive of that Russian newspaper was available for search at the newspaper’s site. Strangely, requested article could not be found by search in the archive …In the end, I was able to retrieve full text of the article from a cache elsewhere – apparently, requested article was for some reason deleted from the newspaper’s archive – but once published on the Net information does not disappear tracelessly , so we, infopros, can sometimes resurrect wiped bits of data

I love this kind of document detective work, so feel free to contact us with any – regular or mysterious – document delivery requests, be that for Russian literature or non-Russian documents, we’ll give it our best try.

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Source: Russian patents blog

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