Assessment of the influence of sociological research as a new type of evidence in cases of protection of intellectual property rights

Abstract

An important precondition for making a lawful and reasoned court decision is to establish the facts of the case, ie a certain range of facts, to which the law relates the legal consequences. They confirm the claims and objections of the parties and are crucial in the process of proof. Given the principles of equality of all participants in the trial before the law and the court, the adversarial nature of the parties, this institution is an important and necessary element of a fair, impartial and timely resolution of disputes by the court. In order to properly resolve disputes in cases of protection of intellectual property rights, which are subject to commercial courts, it is necessary to analyze and establish the actual relationship of the parties in a particular case. To this end, the court should find out whether the defendant has in fact committed violations, affecting the plaintiff's legitimate interests, and whether the defendant has an obligation to restore the plaintiff's rights. However, it is clear that the study of all the circumstances of the case of any commercial dispute is carried out by the court only by examining the evidence that contains information about the facts and information. The article considers the importance of the results of sociological research as a new type of evidence on the examples of dispute resolution by commercial courts in cases of protection of intellectual property rights regarding the similarity to the degree of confusion with another designation.Based on the analysis of decisions of commercial courts, the question of how often the survey data are accepted by commercial courts, how it affects the probability that such results will be accepted as evidence, how the acceptance of sociological research by the commercial court as evidence influences consideration of the case is studied.