Updating the legislation of Ukraine in the field of copyright and its adaptation to EU standards
Леонід Тарасенко, Kh. Yu. Tarasenko · Analytical and Comparative Jurisprudence · 2025
The article considers certain problematic aspects of adapting the legislation of Ukraine in the field of copyright to EU standards. It is established that the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU (2014) defined the principles of reforming Ukrainian legislation in the field of intellectual property, and accordingly, Ukraine for the period 2014–2024 significantly updated the legal regulation of relations in the field of intellectual property, bringing it closer to European standards. It is established that a significant step forward for Ukraine was the institutional reform of the state system of legal protection of intellectual property, in particular, the creation of a national intellectual property authority. Ukraine during 2017–2022 reformed the legislation on copyright, and as of today the relevant legislative provisions almost fully comply with European standards. It has been shown that the Copyright Act (2022) should be viewed positively, as it has provided for the implementation of numerous EU Directives in this area into national law. It has been established that the law distinguishes between a photographic work and a photograph that is created without the creative work of the author and is not endowed with originality (which leads to the fact that such a photograph is not protected by copyright). It has been shown that the sui generis right extends to a database whose creator has made a qualitatively and/or quantitatively significant contribution to the acquisition, verification or presentation of the content of the database; the sui generis right is exercised regardless of whether the relevant database or its content is protected by copyright or other rights and this sui generis right to the database can be transferred (alienated) in accordance with the law. It is established that the legal regulation of relations related to the generation of non-original objects and their legal regime was introduced in Ukraine for the first time, and Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world where the law has introduced legal certainty regarding these objects. It is substantiated that a computer program as of today in the conditions of digitalization requires better legal regulation, which should detail the procedure for creating computer programs, acquiring, exercising and protecting rights to computer programs. It is substantiated that the legal regime of computer programs related to inventions or utility models (the so-called «computer implemented inventions»), as well as the legal regime of free, open source software, also requires legal certainty. It is justified that legal certainty is needed to distinguish between different types of video materials, which include audiovisual works, videograms (as video recordings) and other video recordings (given the significant spread of video materials created daily by almost all smartphone users, and subsequently these video recordings (including edited ones) end up on the Internet (in particular, social networks, video hosting sites, etc.).