New Ukrainian Law on Copyright and Related Rights
by Kateryna Militsyna and Liubov Maidanyk
Last year, the Ukrainian copyright reform got on its fast track. In July the Ukrainian parliament approved one of the legislative proposals on copyright and related rights as a basis. This prompted intensive work on the text of the draft law. A new Ukrainian Law on Copyright and Related Rights was adopted in December, to enter into force on 1 January 2023. See here for the timeline of the draft proposal, here Kat Anastasiia Kyrylenko's post on the draft Law, and here for the new law (Ukrainian only). See also here for the previous law.
Since the new law is too rich with new provisions to cover them all in one post, we have cherry-picked major legislative changes that we consider to be the most interesting. Now, let’s stop beating around the bush or, as Ukrainians would put it, pulling a cat by its tail and get straight to the point.
We got new rules, we count them
Among other things, changes covered the basics – the very requirements for copyright protection. The law introduced a definition of a work. According to it, a work is an original intellectual creation of an author (co-authors) in the scientific, literary, artistic or other domain, expressed in an objective form. In case of authorship the provisions remained virtually unchanged. Like the previous law, the new one equates an author to a human being. Here our attention turns to expression and originality requirements where it gets more interesting. Read more