Courts in Russia began to take into account sanctions in cases of intellectual property rights

The Arbitration Court of the Kirov Region denied the British company Entertainment One UK Limited a claim for the protection of intellectual rights on the grounds that the company is registered in a country that has joined the sanctions against Russia.

As follows from the published court decision (.pdf), the plaintiff filed a lawsuit against the individual entrepreneur I.V. Kozhevnikov on compensation for violation of exclusive rights to a work of fine art. We are talking about drawings depicting Peppa Pig and Daddy Pig (the British company owns the rights to the images from the cartoon "Peppa Pig"). The amount of claims was 40 thousand rubles.

The decision may be appealed within one month.

More than two dozen lawsuits from Entertainment One UK Limited against Russian persons were considered in Russian courts regarding the violation of intellectual rights. However, such claims were mostly filed by Russian representatives by proxy from abroad. In some cases, the courts have questioned the authenticity of such documents and, consequently, the fact that the plaintiffs really represent the British rights holder. For example, the same Arbitration Court of the Kirov Region in 2019 considered (.pdf) that based on the submitted documents “it is impossible to conclude that it was the extract from Entertainment One UK Limited” and returned the statement of claim. British Entertainment One UK Limited is owned by the American corporation Hasbro, which in 2019 acquired the Canadian company - the owner of the rights to the animated series Peppa Pig,

In this case, the arbitration court in Kirov did not at all consider the question of whether the plaintiffs are legitimate representatives of the copyright holder. By default, based on the fact that the plaintiff is a British company-owner, the court refused to satisfy the claims on the basis that the plaintiff is located in the UK, the country that announced sanctions against Russia.