Ukrainian intellectual abracadabra
On March 24th, 2015 yet another and hopefully decisive round of confrontation was finally held between the collective management organization PO ULCRR, representing the rights of Ukrainian Music Publishing Group LLC in Ukraine and Moon Records LLC in the case of recovery of UAH 97 440,00 from the foreign investment enterprise Lukoil-Ukraine. In its Resolution Kyiv Commercial Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal of PO ULCRR http://www.ulasp.org/ against the decision of Commercial Court of Kiev region denying the claim for Ukrainian Music Publishing Group LLC http://umpg.com.ua/ and Moon Records LLC http://moon.ua/.
The case started when PO ULCRR filed the above-mentioned claim requesting the copyright protection for Ukrainian Music Publishing Group LLC and Moon Records LLC. The lawsuit could be categorized as an ordinary one and had nothing special in it. And given the case law established in commercial courts FIE Lukoil-Ukraine http://www.lukoil.com.ua/ukr had minimum winning chances.
Having verified the copyright, we found that under Mutual Representation Agreement with the Broadcast Music Inc. (USA) http://www.bmi.com/the property rights to dispose this work in Ukraine belonged to UACRR, but certainly not to Ukrainian Music Publishing Group LLC. The decision was taken unhesitatingly: UACRR will intervene in proceeding as a third party supporting FIE LUKOIL-Ukraine. We heard a lot of complaints on this matter, saying, "Why do you need it for? Lukoil-Ukraine does not cooperate with you and does not pay royalty to you. Why do you defend the infringer?.." and so forth.
But in fact, the Law of Ukraine has one specific feature: if court had settled the claim in favor of Ukrainian Music Publishing Group LLC, it would have meant that UMPG owned the copyright, but not UACRR. Indeed, the probability of such decision was quite high, given the chaos in the field of copyright protection in Ukraine and when anyone who feels like it or at least every other one calls himself a copyright holder.
Intervening the proceeding, we knew the case would be hard and realized that after UMPG claim denial we would have to file a claim to Lukoil-Ukraine, but we hadn’t any doubts as to the correctness of the path chosen.