Legal Mechanisms of Protection Against Unfair Competition in Ukraine—Prerequisites, Problems and Trends

Fair competition embodies certain moral-ethical and socio-historical ideas about good and evil in business activity, determining the limits of permitted behaviour, especially in competition. Studying the issues of economic competition legislation, we found that researchers have not tried to define the concept and content of fair competition in their research, although each of them pointed to the need to provide conditions for its development and protection. Thus, fair competition serves as a certain ideal or goal of legal regulation for most researchers, but there is no specific objective form of its implementation. The judicial and administrative practices of terminating unfair competition in business activity are based on a similar position, although the decisions of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine and the courts sometimes differ. For 20 years, the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine has been the leader of legal protection against unfair competition, having promoted the ideas of pro-competitive awareness through competition advocacy mechanisms. In the last few years, the leading role in ensuring an effective mechanism for protection against unfair competition has lain with the courts, in particular the Commercial Division of the Supreme Court of Ukraine. That is why we have been observing changes in approaches to the definition of unfair competition and the combination of a general prohibition of unfair competition with related categories of the abuse of rights and the protection of intellectual property rights over the last three to five years.