You're reading: Poverkhnost TV scores big win with high court

Ruling will be studies as landmark case for intellectual property rights in Ukraine.

Lengthy litigation between Poverkhnost Sport TV Ltd. and Vision TV (TM Viasat) has come to an end, with Poverkhnost coming out on top in a ruling from the Ukrainian Supreme Court.

Poverkhnost TV had accused Vision TV of violating property rights through the unauthorized re-broadcasting of the Union of European Football Associations championship league soccer games in the 2008-2009 season.

Poverkhnost sub-licensed several TV channels to do terrestrial transmissions of the matches, but Vision TV re-broadcast those channels live and in re-runs within its satellite package. Those live and satellite broadcasts, Poverkhnost said, violated its exclusive rights. The high court agreed, rejecting Vision’s arguments that it had an agreement for re-transmitting their content.

“We are satisfied with the decision of the Supreme Court,” said Viktoria Zhelenkova, head of the legal department at the Poverkhnost group of companies. “Basically it empowered the ruling of the primary court that ordered Vision TV to pay us a compensation of Hr 8 million.”

Poverkhnost is partly owned by Kyiv Post publisher Mohammad Zahoor.

Vision TV is questioning the decision and doesn’t seem in a hurry to comply.

“We still question the very fact of hearing of this case by the Supreme Court, given that the Constitutional Court defined the High Economic Court as the supreme body in the economic courts system. As a matter of fact, the ruling of the Supreme Court on a cassation appeal was unprecedented,” Oksana Ferchuk, director general of Vision TV, was quoted as saying on the Viasat TV website.

According to Ferchuk’s statement, the company will defend its rights, as it already successfully did twice, winning litigation in the Kyiv Court of Appeals in October and before the High Economic Court two months later.

Poverkhnost doesn’t see a problem in the Supreme Court’s intervention. “The High Economic Court has dealt with our first cassation, so we exercised our right to file the second cassation to the Supreme Court,” Zhelenkova said. “The decision of the latter is final and can’t be contested.”

The Poverkhnost vs. Viasat case is part of a growing number of disputes over intellectual property rights.

“Back in 1995-2000 intellectual property litigations were pretty rare, but now we witness the development of this court practice,” said Yulia Prokhoda, director of INTELS-Ukraine legal and patent company. “So far, most of the litigation of this kind seems to be endless – some of it lasts for 5-10 years.”

Besides, if a company is lucky enough to win a case, collecting compensation is a different matter. “Successful levy executions hardly reaches 10 percent,” Prokhoda said.

Prokhoda called the case a landmark one for copyrights. The ruling will also be studied as part of media law, especially the relationship between the rights to receive and disseminate information and intellectual property rights.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olesia Oleshko can be reached at [email protected].