Приложение 5. Internet and Russian Legal Practice Victor Naumov

06.05.1998 N70-FA, 02.01.2000 N3-FA).

This Act defines as an unfair competition any actions of a business entity, directed to getting an advantage in business, which contradict current legislation provisions, commercial usage and requirements of good faith, reasonableness and justice, and present the threat of damage or have already caused a damage to another market participants – competitors and to their business reputation as well (art.4).

Among the forms of prohibited activities are:

«deceiving customers concerning a nature, methods and a place of manufacturing, consumer characteristics and quality of goods;

sale of goods accompanied by illegal use of the intellectual activity's results and identity means of company, goods and services» (art.10 The forms of unfair competition).

Table 1 shows a brief review of the legal precedents, relating to trademark, service mark and company name infringements through use of domain names, up to

10.05.2001[60].

So in the majority of disputes about the domain names the court has recognized the use of a company name, identical or similar to confusion, as a violation of an owner's rights. Besides that, a registration of the domain name, similar to identity means itself is recognized as an infringement[61].

An exception is presented by a precedent, concerning the domain kamaz.ru, when the plaintiff failed to substantiate, that the purpose of the registration and the use of the domain was a bad faith advantage in the business.

Though the number of national cases, relating to the copyright infringements[62] in Internet, is far not high, it yet allows to recognize the types of violations and legal consequences well known abroad. In Russia there are precedents of an illegal use of materials placed at Internet for publication in books, and of an unauthorized placing at Internet of the materials, which become available outside the Web, and infringements by placing at Internet of music files, computer programs and databases. A brief information about on the mentioned practice is given below in Table 2.

It is obvious that plaintiffs are yet unsuccessful in disputes over their copyright infringements. It can be explained, in particular, by failure to execute an assignment of a copyright to an object, as created in their job tasks performance («Silmarill. Ltd» – «Softland.Ltd» case, «Businessman. Publishing Center. Co.» – «Public library. Co.», «Vector Info. Co.» Case), thus the plaintiffs did not succeed in presenting their pieces of work before the court as created as their job tasks performance[63]; the inherent defects of the contracts, which were the legal grounds for the transfer of exclusive copyrights to objects to the plaintiffs, and an objective difficulty of some objects attribution – first of all computer programs for their huge volumes of texts and codes are too complicated for comparing to decide whether they are similar or different.

Typical cases put the problem of a status of an evidence received from Internet:

—Each computer file has unique address, which consists of an indication of its name and the file's directory;

—Being placed on a server a file differs from the information received by the user's on-line visual representation of a resource.