Protection of the Exclusive Rights to a Character

A character is a set of descriptions and (or) images of one or another personage in a work in the form inherent in this work. The characters, being one of the most recognizable and frequently used elements of the work, are still deprived of sufficient legislative regulation. There is a relative consensus in the doctrine of civil law that a character should have a certain status, and the authors of works in which this character is used should have sufficiently transparent mechanisms to protect their rights to the character. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that there are several types of characters, each of them has its own specifics, which are not always clear to the courts, so the authors do not always have the opportunity to effectively protect their rights. Rather fragmentary legislative regulation is currently the main cause of disputes in this area and inaccuracies in law enforcement in practice. The purpose of the thesis is to comprehensively study and analyze the currently available legal regulation of characters. To achieve the purpose of the study, the following tasks were performed: 1) the definition of a character as an independent object of copyright is given; 2) international treaties and legislation of the Russian Federation concerning the protection of the rights to the character have been studied; 3) the specifics of different types of characters are investigated; 4) the ways of protecting the rights to the character are analyzed; 5) proposals have been formulated to improve and supplement the explanations of the highest judicial instance regarding the protection of the rights to the characters of the works.