Compensation as a form of copyright enforcement in Ukraine: a thorny path to balance of interests

The author determines that the growing role and importance of intellectual property require an increase in the efficiency of its legal enforcement and analyzes the compliance of the national legislation of Ukraine on the methods of copyright enforcement with the provisions of the acquis communautaire and the legislation of the European Union.The article is devoted to determining the legal nature of monetary compensation as a form of compensation for pecuniary damage for copyright infringement.The main form of compensation for pecuniary damage caused to the affected person is compensation for damages, which includes actual damages and lost profits. When making a claim for damages, the right holder is obliged to prove the existence and amount of damages, as well as their causal connection with the actions of the infringer, which can be quite complicated,as it requires submission to the court of evidence of the existence of damages, documents confirming their amount, as well as evidence that the damages were caused by the actions of a particular infringer. The application of a one-time monetary penalty instead of compensation for damages or recovery of the infringer's income for the unlawful use of a workprovides for the determination of the amount of this penalty in accordance with the law, taking into account the fault of the person and other circumstances that are essential.The history of the implementation of this method of copyright protection in Ukraine is thorny: from «penalty» compensation, typical for the US law (1993–2018), to «estimated» compensation of hypothetical royalties, typical for the EU countries (2018–2022), and finally to the alternative use of both approaches at the discretion of the copyright holder and the emergence of new participants in civil relations who have acquired the right to recover it.In addition, the author identifies that the emergence of an additional «monetary» method of copyright protection in the Ukrainian legal system — «application of a one-time monetary payment», which can be applied simultaneously (and not instead of) the recovery of compensation — creates new prospects for the protection of infringed copyright.