UK-Ukraine Twinning: University of Nottingham and Ukrainian Catholic University

We received funding for our project on intellectual property ‘UCU-UoN United in Solidarity – Intellectual Property Rights: A tool or obstacle on the road to reconstruction’. This project is a collaboration between the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU, Lviv) Law School and the School of Law of the University of Nottingham.

In the first stage we organised a joint research seminar in Nottingham in December 2023. It offered the opportunity to staff and students from UCU to present their research to colleagues at Nottingham and to debate the issue. At the end of the workshop a series of policy recommendations were drafted.

When a second amount of limited funding became available, we used it in essence for dissemination purposes. We held a joint scientific and practical event, UCU-Nottingham IP Talks, on the topic: ‘Reforming the Intellectual Property Protection System in Ukraine in Times of War’. 

The event took place on 27 September 2024 in a mixed format: offline in L’viv and online. Online participants included Prof Torremans from Nottingham, who offered an introductory keynote speech. The event aimed to discuss the current state of reforming the legal regulation of intellectual property protection in Ukraine under EU standards and the practice of its application in times of war.

During the event, organisers held two panel discussions. These united representatives of different areas of law enforcement: First Deputy Director of the IP Office, Judges of the Civil and Commercial Courts of Cassation of the Supreme Court, Chairman of the Western Commercial Court of Appeal, heads of leading Ukrainian scientific institutions specialising in intellectual property, as well as certified forensic experts, attorneys and prominent scientists. The student community also took an active part in the event.

Within the event, the participants:

1. Outlined the main directions of the intellectual property policy of Ukraine implemented by the IP Office of Ukraine and global trends in the search for answers by the IP Office to the challenges of war.
2. Discussed the state of legislative regulation of intellectual property rights protection in Ukraine and its compliance with EU standards and formulated the proposals for its improvement in the light of understanding intellectual property rights as a basic fundamental human right.
3. Highlighted problematic aspects and challenges arising from the implementation of legislation on intellectual property protection in wartime at all levels of law enforcement: in the practice of lawyers, in the practice of forensic experts, and in court practice.
4. Analysed the main trends in the consideration of intellectual property cases by the commercial courts of appeal and the Supreme Court.
5. Discussed current issues of judicial practice in disputes on copyright protection, rights to inventions and utility models, industrial designs on the example of specific court cases and decisions.
    

This event was a productive conclusion to the project and a cornerstone for laying the groundwork for further cooperation between University of Nottingham and Ukrainian Catholic University. At the same time, having realised that the implementation of our policy recommendations would involve a substantial amount of IP licensing and that such licences would often be governed by English law, we developed an English contract law tool. The same tool can also be used for a module on English contract law for UCU law students.

Find out more about the Twinning scheme and our work to support higher education institutions in Ukraine on our Ukraine webpage. 

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