Contracts in the field of disposal of property rights to objects of related rights under the legislation of Ukraine: constitutional and civil law aspects

Abstract

What is this work devoted to? The purpose of this work is to highlight the gaps studied by the author, which are common to the entire system of contracts in the field of disposal of property rights to objects of related rights under the legislation of Ukraine in terms of their consistency with the guarantees provided by the Constitution of Ukraine. This work was carried out thanks to the dialectical approach, logical techniques, as well as hermeneutic-legal and comparative-legal methods.

Based on the research conducted, the author of the article achieved the following results. Thus, the existence of such gaps was established as: the absence of the person of the creator of objects of related rights, despite the fact that in some forms of disposal of property rights, including objects of related rights, the legislator speaks indirectly about the creator and about granting him personal non-property rights; the absence of a clearly prescribed moment of transfer of property rights from the person of the creator to other subjects under a number of contracts. These gaps are fundamental, while others that the author draws attention to are derived from them, but are also very important. The reason for these gaps, in the author’s opinion, is a truncated understanding of intellectual property rights in relation to creators and an exaggeration of the technical component in the creation of objects of related rights. What do these gaps affect? These gaps make it impossible for the creators who created them to dispose of property rights to objects of related rights, and also deprive them of the opportunity to protect the related right belonging to them, which for some reason is not recognized. The author of the article concludes that the proposal to attribute creators to subjects of related rights without changing the existing structure of the Civil Code of Ukraine and the relevant Law of Ukraine “On Copyright and Related Rights”, as well as unifying objects of copyright and related rights into a single group of objects and also without changing the existing legislation mentioned above, is appropriate. In the opinion of the author of the work, in the future it will be advisable to affix both copyright and related rights protection marks on related rights objects, taking into account the proposed changes.

All proposed changes will be aimed at harmonizing the relevant legislation of Ukraine in the field of intellectual property law on the above issues with the guarantees provided by the Constitution of Ukraine, and accordingly ensuring the functioning of legal regulation on these issues as a holistic system.