Russia jurisdiction report: Landing a licence

Form and requirements

To be valid the licence agreement must be registered with Rospatent, the Russian governmental agency in charge of intellectual property. No due date for licence agreement registration is set. However, failing to register a licence will result in the licence not being considered as being in force. The licensor will not be able to collect royalties if the licence is invalid or expired. On the other hand, using the registered IP without a valid licence granted by the owner of the IP right constitutes an infringement.

The agreement must be made in writing and translated into Russian. Bilingual agreements are also subjects for registration and can be used as an option. The English and Russian versions must completely correspond to each other.

The subject of the licence agreement can be only registered right, ie, pending trademark national trademark applications, pending international trademarks or pending patent applications cannot be a subject for the agreement.

Rospatent accepts the following documents for the licence agreement: