On 7th and 8th of December 2021 Yuri Bolotov, our Managing Partner and Zhanat Nurmagambetov, Partner gave lectures in Kostanay Academy of Internal Affairs named after Sh. Kabylbayev.
The lectures were devoted to the issues of protection of intellectual property in Kazakhstan.
Yuri Bolotov made a brief introduction on issues of IP protection in Kazakhstan. Zhanat Nurmagambetov described in details the system of IP protection, which means that no one can use a protected trademark in Kazakhstan without a permission of a trademark owner.
The trademark use according to the Kazakhstani legislation means placement of trademark on the already produced product or its package, production of goods, import of goods on the territory of Kazakhstan, storage of these goods, proposal of a product for sale and the sale itself. It was resumed that any action with the goods bearing a trademark on which the trademark is placed, already means the TM usage.
Zhanat also explained what the infringement of trademark rights is. The most frequent trademark infringements on the market were listed, the examples of counterfeit goods were given and also ways of distribution of faked goods were discussed.
The issue of the sale of faked goods, which is recognized as an organized crime was especially underlined. According to OESD, which made some researches in this field, the annual margin received by the organized crime groups from the sale of counterfeit goods substantively bigger than a total margin from the sale of drugs, illegal gambling, prostitution, human and organ trafficking, theft of oil, gold and other precious metals.
At the end of the lecture, the methods of distributing faked goods as well as which responsibility arises in case of trademark rights infringement were outlined.