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Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice. 2016. No. 5. P. 355-359.
The history of the UNESCO Chair on Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Rights dates back to June 1998, when the Director General of UNESCO and the President of the Institute of International Law and Economics named after A. S. Griboedov (IILE) signed an Agreement on the establishment of the Chair. Over the last years the UNESCO Chair has become the regional center of international cooperation on the issues of Intellectual Property Rights and Information Law in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), having established its branches in a number of subjects of the Russian Federation (the Tatarstan Republic and others). It has assisted in the establishment of similar UNESCO Chairs in Belarus, Georgia and Moldova.
On March 20, 2009 the UNESCO Chair changed the host university. At present the UNESCO Chair is a scientific and methodological center at the Higher School of Economics.
The UNESCO Chair conducts its work in cooperation with the RF Commission on UNESCO issues, with Sector of Culture and Sector of Communication and Information of the UNESCO Secretariat as well as with the UNESCO Moscow Office and the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education.
The activity of the Chair has a comprehensive character and covers Copyright and Neighboring Rights, Patent Law and other spheres of Industrial Property, as well as Information Law, including Mass Media Law, Cyberspace Law etc.
The Chairholder is the Honorable Lawyer of the Russian Federation, Doctor of Law, Professor Mikhail A. Fedotov. He has many years of teaching experience in different Law Schools. In the 1990s he has served as a Minister of Press and Information of the RF, a Director General of the Russian Agency of Intellectual Property under the RF President, and he was the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to UNESCO, with the diplomatic rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. He is one of the authors of the Russian Mass Media Law and one of the creators of the Copyright Law along with some other federal acts.
Today the UNESCO Chair is a large scientific team (18 Doctors of Law and 43 Candidates of Law) uniting leading experts working in different universities and research institutions, federal legislative and executive bodies, law firms, copyright societies, in different regions and even in different countries (including members from Belarus and Ukraine, the United States and Germany). They share common interest in the field of Intellectual Property Rights, Information Law, Media Law etc. Due to joint research activities of the UNESCO Chair members in 1998—2008 it has gained the position of a leading expert center in the Russian Federation. At the same time, the administrative staff of the UNESCO Chair is considerably small and consists of only five employees.
The main spheres of the UNESCO Chair’s activities in the abovementioned areas are as follows: