International seminar "SOFT&PATENT-2019" on the software protection in the USA, EU and PRC
The event was intended primarily for export-oriented Belarusian software development companies and country leading universities that train personnel for the IT industry.
Representatives of 7 countries attended the seminar (Belarus, Vietnam, Germany, PRC, Lithuania, Russia, USA), including speakers from the USA, Germany, PRC and the Republic of Belarus, as well as listeners from software developers and experts of the National Center of Intellectual Property (hereinafter-NCIP), judges of the Judicial Board for Intellectual Property of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Belarus, teachers, students and postgraduates of BSU, BSUIR and Masherov VSU, patent attorneys of Belarus, Lithuania and Russia.
Vyacheslav Trofimov, director of the "BelpatentService " of the Belarusian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the patent attorney of the Republic of Belarus, and Angela Plenkina, deputy general director of the Central Research Institute, addressed the participants of the international seminar with welcoming words. Yevgeny Pak, the deputy director of the enterprise-organizer of the seminar was the moderator of this international event.
Experts on patent protection and protection of intellectual property objects of the PRC, the EU, the USA and the Republic of Belarus made presentations at the seminar.
The seminar was divided into four sections.
In the first section of the seminar "Software Protection" Yevgeny Pak presented to the audience a brief overview of approaches to patenting in the United States, the EU and the PRC. Sergey Shebeko, head of the Rights Protection Department of the Center for Collective Management of the NCIP, told about the copyright form of protection of computer programs in the Republic of Belarus. Vyacheslav Trofimov presented to the seminar participants a quantitative analysis of patenting in the Republic of Belarus of developments related to computer programs and the possibility of their protection using the patent legal form.
In the second section "Patent – as a tool for software protection in the PRC", V. Trofimov gave a brief overview of the patent activity of the PRC as a whole and patent statistics of the PRC in the field of software, and also gave an analysis of software patenting in the PRC by leading companies of the world. Attorney for Intellectual Property Affairs of the PRC, member of the Union of Lawyers of the PRC, member of the Association of Lawyers Tim Meng spoke about practical issues of software protection under copyright and patent law, about the possibilities of protecting computer programs from copying, about administrative and judicial systems and procedures in the PRC.
In the third section "The European approach to software patenting", Yevgeny Pak presented to the audience examples of patents protection for industrial designs of software products by leading world companies. Then the patent attorney of Germany, the European patent attorney, a specialist in the field of inventions implemented using digital data processing, Markus Muschke told about the requirements for filing applications for a European software patent, criteria for patentability of inventions related to software, presented practical examples of registration of patent applications and decisions of the European Patent Office (hereinafter - the EPO) on them, requirements imposed by the EPO to the description and claims for software products.
The fourth section "Software patenting in the USA-as a strategic imperative" was the liveliest. Y.Pak told the participants of the event about the patents of the company “Facebook” in the field of face recognition. After that, the US patent attorney, who previously worked at the US Patent Office, Gregory Lars Gunnerson, told the audience about the approaches to software patenting in the US compared to the EU, about the requirements of the US Patent Office for the software claims and the unity of the invention, about the possibilities of preventing software forgery and litigation related to violations of the rights of patent owners, answering a large number of questions from the audience. The spontaneous performance of the inventor from the USA Todd S. Glassy, who told about the trial of his American patent in the field of software for determining the location based on an application on mobile computing devices, such as smartphones caused a revival during the work of the section and an ambiguous reaction of the audience.
Closing the event Vyacheslav Trofimov noted that different opinions were expressed at the seminar regarding the ways of protecting software products in the world, but most of the event participants agreed that the trend towards the norms of patent and legal protection of software has prevailed in the world recently, which should be taken into account by Belarusian software developers, including residents of the Hi-Tech Park.
