Judicial protection of intellectual property rights to animal breeds in civil proceedings (comparative legal aspect)

Abstract

The relevance of this study is conditioned upon the lack of specialized legal regulation concerning the breed of animals as an object of intellectual property, which considerably complicates the judicial protection of property and personal non-property rights. The purpose of this study was to investigate the civil legal protection of intellectual property rights for animal breeds in Ukraine, considering foreign practices. For the systematic study of Ukrainian and foreign legislation, formal-legal, logical-legal, comparative-legal, and other special methods were used. Through the analysis of the Ukrainian regulatory framework, it was found that the provisions of the patent legislation must be considered for the implementation of judicial protection of rights to animal breeds. The results of the study of the provisions of the specialized laws of Ukraine from the standpoint of civil legal protection of intellectual property rights were presented and the following methods of protection were highlighted, which by analogy can be applied to the animal breed: recognition of the right, change, or termination of the legal relationship, restoration of the position that existed before the violation of the right, recognition of the deed invalid, termination of infringing actions, compensation for damages and moral damage, forced performance of the obligation in kind. It was established that a special method of judicial protection of animal breed rights is the application of a one-time penalty in the form of a certain amount of money instead of compensation for damages. Using a comparative legal analysis of foreign practices, namely in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Kyrgyzstan, it was discovered that the legal protection of animal breed rights is primarily determined by the presence of a protective legal document, such as a patent or certificate. The theoretical value of this paper is that this study is the first to analyse the issue of judicial civil law protection of animal breeds as an object of intellectual property law in Ukraine, while also factoring in the foreign practices. The practical value is that the study results can be used to eliminate gaps and conflicts in the legal regulation of animal breeds as objects of intellectual property. The proposals expressed in this paper can be considered in the legislative initiatives.