The fifth successive Intellectual Property and the Internet Conference for 2020 was held 4th September. Unlike in previous years, instead of being held at the Belgrade University Faculty of Law the conference was held entirely online. Anyone interested was able to listen to talks – streamed on YouTube – by prominent local and foreign experts on current and significant topics relating to intellectual property. This year too, the conference was jointly organised by the Belgrade Faculty of Law and the Serbian National Internet Domain Name Registry Foundation.
After words of greeting from Professor Dr Zoran Mirković, Dean of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, Ivan Minić, vice-president of the RNIDS Foundation Board of Governors and Professor Dr Dušan V. Popović, chair of the conference organising committee, Dr Krystyna Kowalik-Bańczyk, judge of the General Court of the EU, based in Luxembourg gave her introductoryu talk. This was an exceptionally rare opportunity for the public in Serbia to hear a talk by a representative of this institution at a local conference. Dr Kowalik-Bańczyk talked about the experiences of the EU General Court with respect to online trademark infringements, giving interesting and relevant examples.
This was followed by talks from lecturers of the faculties of law in Belgrade and Novi Sad, with Professor Dr Slobodan M. Marković, full professor of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law discussing the relationship between copyright, the copyright holder and the Internet, while Professor Dr Sanja Radovanović, associate professor of the University of Novi Sad Faculty of Law looked at the topics of duplicating copyrighted works for personal use and cloud computing. Prof. Dr Dušan V. Popović, full professor of the Belgrade University Faculty of Law, discussed the European approach to exhaustion of intellectual property rights for digital copies of a work.
During the conference there was also a presentation of the “Intellectual Property and the Internet (2020)” journal, supported financially by RNIDS and published by the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law.. Four authors of papers published in the journal spoke at the conference on different topics, giving those attending an opportunity to hear about intellectual property rights and BIM technology, the right to be forgotten from the legal and computing points of view and recommendations for creative commons licences in Serbian intellectual property rights.
Part of the conference was devoted to domains and intellectual property, and Dejan Đukić, acting director of RNIDS-a, talked about the removal from the Internet of content that violates intellectual property rights from the point of view of domain registries. Alexandre Cruquenaire, Belgian lawyer and lecturer at the University of Namur, explained the legal framework applied to the new generic domains (gTLDs). Prof. Dr Marko Jovanović, associate professor at the Belgrade University Faculty of Law, talked about aspects of international private law governing the resolution of domain name-related disputes.
For all those who are interested but were not able to watch the conference stream, a recording is available on the RNIDS YouTube channel.