Study  |  01/27/2023

Comprehensive Work on Ukrainian Competition and Intellectual Property Law Published

The book project, the result of which is now available, already began in 2020. Heiko Richter, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute, has published “Competition and Intellectual Property Law in Ukraine”, the most comprehensive book on Ukrainian competition and intellectual property law in English to date.

Participants of the workshop in Kyiv in October 2021. Photo: Sophia Sorg
Participants of the workshop in Kyiv in October 2021. Photo: Sophia Sorg

The 600-page publication is the completion of a two-and-a-half-year project. More than 20 Ukrainian legal scholars were involved in the project, and their contributions cover a broad range of topics. The holistically designed volume aims to make the development and current state of Ukrainian law accessible and visible to the international research community. In addition to promoting academic discourse, the book aims to appeal to policy-makers. Thus, the contributions discuss and elaborate on legal policy reform proposals.


Recent legal developments in Ukraine have been extraordinarily dynamic. Not least as a result of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU concluded in 2014, Ukrainian and competition and intellectual property law have undergone significant changes. The study examines theoretical aspects of legal harmonization as well as actual developments in the areas of international trade law, antitrust and unfair competition law, intellectual property law and copyright law. The spectrum of topics ranges from the “Europeanisation” of Ukrainian antitrust law and the regulation of the digital economy under antitrust law to access to medicines and the significance of geographical indications to the reform of collecting societies and the protection of artificial intelligence under intellectual property law.


With the aim of presenting a reference book, the authors collaborated intensively across institutional and national borders. It is owing to the authors’ perseverance and confidence that the manuscript could finally be completed in late summer 2022 in the midst of the turmoil of war. For the Institute, in addition to the editor, Moritz Sutterer, Daria Kim, Sophia Sorg and Claudia Dalmau Gomez were involved in the project, which was also accompanied by an online and a face-to-face workshop in Kyiv in October 2021. Many personal contacts were established in the course of the project.


Competition and Intellectual Property Law in Ukraine is published by Springer as part of the series MPI Studies on Intellectual Property and Competition Law. It is available for download via Springer-Link as PDF and EPUB. The print version is available in bookshops.