Today Moscow hosted a round table on Approaches and Tools for Resolving Ethical and Legal Issues of Copyright Protection and Other Internet-related Rights, organized by the RF Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Irina Stepanova, head of the intellectual property practice at EPAM, St Petersburg Office, took part in the event.

The round table aimed to discuss matter related to ensuring ethical, lawful and good faith business activities on the Internet, propagating successful work experience based on civilized business conduct standards and up keeping ethical standards of business conduct on the Internet.

The round table brought together business professionals in the area of Internet communications, intellectual property lawyers and business ethics researchers. The experts have discussed the ethical and legal issues related to ensuring and enforcing copyright protection on the Internet, the currently existing approaches, models, problem solving and tackling practices, opportunities and resources for minimizing negative implications for authors, copyright owners, reputation of the business Internet-community and Internet business efficiency, as well as the issues related to ensuring the Internet users' legal protection.

Representatives of the business community and non-profit organizations talked about the existing initiatives of the companies and entrepreneurs' associations related to the Internet development, usage and functioning to satisfy market needs, based on the principles and standards of civilized business conduct.

In her speech, Irina Stepanova focused on the need to address the gaps in the current legislation that applies to the Internet-based relations. ‘Something that needs specific regulation is hosting providers' liability for posting on the web items that are subject to copyright. These relations are already regulated in the European Union countries and the USA while absence of relevant rules of law in Russia materially impedes the protection of the rights of bona fide parties involved in civil law relations,' noted Irina.