Lecture
The protection of inventions in Russia has its roots in the 16th–17th centuries. Its legal form arose on the basis of the feudal «privilege» and for a long time retained the nature of the «charters of grant» issued by royal favour. Such charters were issued, for example, for the establishment of manufactories.
The initial stage of the protection of inventions acquired a finished legal form with the signing on 17 June 1812 of the manifesto "On Privileges for Various Inventions and Discoveries in the Arts and Crafts". In essence this was the first patent law, which regulated the content and form of privileges for inventions, the procedure for granting them, their term of validity, fees, the grounds for annulment and the procedure for judicial proceedings. A remarkable fact: the signing of the manifesto by Alexander I was not even prevented by Napoleon's invasion of Russia, which had begun shortly before.
The "Regulation on Privileges for Inventions and Improvements", approved on 20 May 1896, consolidated the principal elements of a more modern patent system. It included the requirement to submit a description of the invention identifying its subject matter and distinctive features, the conduct of a substantive examination of inventions for novelty, the grant of an exclusive right to use inventions for a term of 15 years, and others.
The patent proper, however, as a form of protection of inventions, was introduced on 12 September 1924 by the leadership of the newly formed Soviet Union on the territory of the former Russian Empire.
Yet the sole rule of the patent system lasted only until 1931, when the "Regulation on Inventions and Technical Improvements" introduced, as the principal one, a form of legal protection of inventions by means of the author's certificate. Without making any substantial changes to the procedure for obtaining the protective document itself, the new system radically altered the legal relations of invention, under which all inventions registered in this way were declared the property of the state. Only in the 1990s, in the course of the socio-economic transformations then taking place, first in the Soviet Union (1991) and then in the Russian Federation (1992), was the patent system restored once again.
The organisational forms of managing the system of legal protection of industrial property underwent repeated changes. In the pre-revolutionary period, patent procedures were carried out within the Senate, the Manufacture Collegium, the Ministry of Finance, and the Department of Trade and Manufactures of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, under which the Committee for Technical Affairs and a patent library were established in 1896.
The Soviet period was even richer in changes. The Committee for Inventions Affairs under the Scientific and Technical Council of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, created in 1918, was succeeded by the Committee for Invention under the Council of Labour and Defence (1931), followed by the Committee for Inventions and Discoveries (1947) and the Committee for Inventions and Discoveries Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR (1955). With the formation of the Russian Federation, the corresponding functions of the patent office came to be performed by the Committee for Patents and Trademarks (1992), and from 1996 by the Russian Agency for Patents and Trademarks (Rospatent).
By Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of 9 March 2004 No. 314 "On the System and Structure of Federal Executive Bodies", the Russian Agency for Patents and Trademarks was transformed into the Federal Service for Intellectual Property, Patents and Trademarks, which is under the authority of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. The Federal Service for Intellectual Property, Patents and Trademarks is a federal executive body exercising the functions of control and supervision in the field of the legal protection and use of objects of intellectual property.
Comments