New in intellectual property law

Section V “Intellectual Property” of the Civil Code of the Republic of Belarus, which will enter into force on November 19, 2024, has been conceptually amended. The amendments include, among others, the following:

•  Article 982 conceptually regulates the concepts of property and non-property rights: (a) property rights, unlike non-property rights, are not recognized to originally belong to the author and may belong to another person, for example an author’s employer; (b) property rights include, first of all, an exclusive right,  and may include other rights provided for by law, (c) non-property rights (right of authorship and others provided by law) belong to the authors of works of science, literature and art, performances, inventions, utility models and industrial designs;varieties of plants and animal breeds; topologies of integrated circuits;
• Article 983 provides that the performance of work or the provision of services using an object of intellectual property for and on the order (assignment) of the holder of the exclusive right to such an object, expressed in an agreement, for a contractor (performer) does not constitute the use of the intellectual property object;
• Article 985 has been supplemented with a new rule providing for the possibility of alienation, as well as granting of an exclusive right for a certain period without concluding an agreement with the copyright holder, but only in cases established by legislative acts;
• Article 986 expressly establishes that upon alienation of an exclusive right, the rights and obligations under existing license agreements are transferred to the acquirer;
• Article 989, which regulates the agreement on the creation and use of the results of intellectual activity, directly stipulates the moment of transfer to the customer of the rights to the extent determined by the agreement as the moment of acceptance of the work/service performed, unless otherwise determined by legislative acts or agreement of the parties; limits the author's liability for non-performance or improper performance of the contract only to actual damage, excluding lost profits; places the risk of impossibility of fulfilling the contract on the customer, unless legislative acts or contract provide otherwise;
• Article 993 in relation to objects of copyright and related rights establishes an assumption of creative nature of any work: “a work is considered to be created by creative work until it is proved otherwise” (accordingly, a person who does not recognize the creative nature of a particular work will have to prove this);
• Article 994 provides for an increase in the term of copyright to seventy years after the death of the author; the new term applies to those works that, as of January 1, 2024, had not yet entered the public domain.