Distant & Digital 2021, program announced

On October 28-29 in Moscow, the conference Distant & Digital More will bring together on its venue more than 200 speakers. They will discuss the trends in digitization of the legal field and challenges to intellectual property rights. The conference offers a rich program to include 50 thematic sessions and workshops where the sector leaders will share their knowledge and experiences in the field of IP market, protection of nonmaterial assets and creative technology solutions.

Top-rated speakers include Paul Neo, Board Member of Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation&Technology Association (ALITA), Karolina Jackowicz, co-founder of KJ ADR, Aleksey Nikiforov, director for legal support at Sibur Group, Aleksey Smirnov, vice president legal at Rostelecom, Aleksey Abramov, managing partner of Gardium Patent Office, Sergei Bekrenev, president of the European Legal Service (ELS) Group, Igor Drozdov, chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation, Maxim Proksh, chairman of the IPChain Association, Sergey Matveev, president of the Intellectual Property Federation (IPF), Ruslan Gazalov, founder of ArtLaw Center for Legal Protection of Creative Industries, Anatoly Semyonov, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs on Intellectual Property and Creative Industries, Chairman of the Board of "Community of Users of Copyright and Related Rights,” Victor Loschilin, Head of Legal Practice in Intellectual Property and Information Technology at Yandex; Alexander Zhuravlyov, Chairman of the Commission for Legal Support of the Digital Economy of the Moscow Branch of the Association of Lawyers of Russia, Elena Avakyan, Executive Director, Nonprofit Partnership for the Promotion of Corporate Law, Vitaly Kalyatin, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel at RUSNANO Management Company LLC, Anna Kostyra, founder and managing partner of Legit law firm, and Pyotr Kondrashov, head of the GARANT-LegalTech project, Pyotr Kondrashov, head of the GARANT-LegalTech project, Demyan Kudryavtsev, Russian media manager and entrepreneur, Ekaterina Chukovskaya, director of the Research and Educational Center of Intellectual Property and Digital Economy Digital IP, Dmitry Konnov, managing partner of ZVONKO GROUP, Maksim Dmitriev, chairman of the Russian Copyright Society (RAS), among many others.

"Five years of experience in the organization of legal conferences enabled us to create an optimal form of collaboration where each participant can find useful content and conduct a knowledge synthesis. The balance of market competition and public interest, remote work, digitalization issues, intellectual property management at the level of startups and corporations just a few issues that we tried to address in the program of this year’s conference Distant & Digital,” said the managing partner at the Intellectual Property Center Skolkovo Anton Pushkov.

 The business program of the conference is organized around four thematic tracks – "Create," "Manage," "Protect," and LegalTech.

One of the central events on October 28 will feature the plenary session “Rights of consumer of intellectual product: end of possession, disinformation, information harmful to health and development. Top experts will explain the boundary between the use and “consumption” of intellectual property assets, and whether traditional norms of copyright protection are applicable to anonymizing network relations.

What does the future have in store for databases and data without databases? What are NFTs — a hype or new economy? What are the legal problems behind the creative appropriation of territory — street art, action art, public art? Who owns the rights to AI-generated assets? Experts will discuss intellectual rights as a “boost” of creative industries and consider information as a universal but nonlegal object of relationships. Speakers of the track titled “Create” will address these – and other – pressing issues. The track will also include a Q&A session: startups will be able to ask potential investors any questions about intellectual property rights.

 What is the role of information intermediaries? How should holdings and corporations manage their intellectual rights? How to attract investment for your creative assets? The track “Manage” focuses on the practice of registration of software rights, effective models of brand promotion and change in approaches to the unity of industrial designs. Experts of the track will find vulnerabilities in private and public law regulation of online games and cybersport, offering practical recommendations for fighting pirated content.

Is starting a lawsuit for copyright infringement a copyright protection, or a way to “make money?” How will the rights to IP assets in creative industries, science and technology turn into revenues provided that the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation № 378 of June 28, 2021 (“On Establishment of the Russian Public-State Organization “Russian Center for regulation of turnover of intellectual property assets”) is brought into action? What will change in the sphere of intellectual property?

At the track titled “Protect,” the conference attendees will discuss the practice of IP court in 2020-2021, acute issues and prospects of recognition of trademarks, traditional and non-traditional means of territory individualization. At the partner session of the law firm “A. Zalesov and partners” participants will discuss pharmaceutical patent disputes while Eversheds Sutherland will host a partner workshop “Cloning business solutions. Ways to prevent leakage of ideas and stop their illegal use.”

During the on-track session of LegalTech, members of professional community will attend a series of partnership sessions and workshops: on improvement of the legal role of institutions in remote environment (Garant Company session); legal barriers to the digital economy (session of the Russian Lawyers Association); the impact of the pandemic on legal technology developments (session of ALITA); on management of intellectual property for businesses (session of Gardium); an ecosystem approach at the market of legal services (session of European Legal Service); on protection of software products at all stages of their development (workshop of Legit); on tools of LegalTech for a digital expert in businesses and agencies of the state using an example of the banking sector (Naumen session).  

Jeffit experts will give a talk to explain how to move from disparate applications to a single legal service ecosystem using Sibur and United Metallurgical Company as examples. Specialists in document automation systems TurboContract and DM Solutions will also share their insights at workshops.

Anton Pronin, Director of the Legal Technologies Center of the Skolkovo Foundation, said that attendees would learn some of the new business principles that have emerged in response to the pandemic to transform them into high professional standards: “Last year the world became immersed in remote working. Legal sphere almost completely switched to this type of work. The need for a new approach to business processes has emerged.

This year, the trend partly continues, and this is the reason why our partners have issued practical recommendations that will facilitate the change of a business model in their company to make it competitive in the new normal, boost the value of creative assets, and eventually move the legal field from conservative to the high-tech sector.”

The expert said that LegalTech was still dominated by relatively simple products related to references, knowledge databases, or drafting standard contracts. Machine learning and big data processing are developing rapidly.

Legal services are in demand in such fields as space law, robot law, and transactions with non-interchangeable tokens.

The contest LegalTech Most Creative will become the top event of the LegalTech track: top 5 will make the most innovative and creative solutions in LegalTech. Finalists will receive awards from the conference partners and certificates from n’RIS service for core deposit intangibles.

Distant & Digital 2021 will be organized in close collaboration by the IPChain Association and the international communication brand IPQuorum. The co-organizers of the Conference are the Intellectual Property Federation and the Education Center for Intellectual Property and Digital Economy Digital IP.

The official partners of the event are the Skolkovo Foundation, Rostelecom, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), and Sibur. Partners of the sessions feature European Legal Service, Garant company, Gardium patent law firm, Naumen group of companies, A. Zalesov and partners law firm.

 Partners of a series of workshops include Jeffit service, Moscow Digital School, Legit law firm, IPEX digital platform, IPCodex tax data showcase, Online Patent company, n'RIS service, Co-Fi crowdfunding platform, DM Solutions company, TurboContract system for document creation and filing, and Eversheds Sutherland company. The conference is organized under the aegis of the Singapore Academy of Law and the Moscow chamber of the Association of Lawyers of Russia.

The Communications Partner of the Forum is a Moscow-based communications agency Prophet. We are delighted to work with media partners including Forbes Russia, magazines Expert, Strategy, SHORTREAD, The Lawyer, Legal Insight, The Paragraph Magazine, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Advokatskaya Gazeta, InterMedia news agency, websites MovieStart, Berza, ICT-Online.ru, and ICT2GO.ru. 

About the Conference

The Distant & Digital conference formed as a result of partnership between two major events in the field of intellectual property: IP Academy and Skolkovo LegalTech. A new form of conference proved its worth in 2020 revealing a wide range of modern LegalTech and IP technologies. More than 200 reputable professionals from Russia and 20 countries shared their experiences in adaptability in the highly competitive market of human resources and their forecasts about the future of law and the institute of intellectual property, the judicial system and society on the whole. The conference hosted over 50 online events, including business talks, lectures and workshops.

At various time periods, participants and partners of IP Academy, Skolkovo LegalTech and Distant & Digital included Sibur, Russian Railways, Russian Post, Moscow Metro, Novolipetsk Metallurgical Plant, "Aeroflot, Rusnano, Avon, Sberbank, Gazprombank, VTB, Rosbank, Deloitte Legal, Yandex, MTS, Thomson Reuters, Rosbank, Avito, HSE University, European Legal Service, Aston Martin, Baker McKenzie, and Garant.

More information about the program and terms of participation in the Distant & Digital conference can be found on the official website.