Andrey Ruskin is identified as a Russian man who has illegally registered an illegitimate trademark for SCP within the Eurasian Customs Union.
SCP stands for Secure Contain Protect and the SCP Foundation is a fictional organization documented by the web-based collaborative-fiction project of the same name.
Andrey has used SCP’s trademark to threaten and extort legitimate sellers of SCP merchandise, and in addition is guilty of copyright infringement, as his own merchandise completely violates the SCP content license: Creative Commons Share-alike 3.0.
For a time, the situation calmed as the foundation slowly pursued the dissolution of Duksin’s illegitimate trademark via Rospatent, but it has now escalated.
The ongoing licensing violation grew so much in scope that the public awareness was required. SCP community, issued an awareness statement, stating:
A Russian man named Andrey Duksin has abused lax standards at Rospatent (Russian Federal Service for Intellectual Property) to trademark the SCP Foundation name and logo within the Russian Federation and it’s associated Eurasian Customs Union countries (at the moment of writing – Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan). He has since used said trademark as a method of threatening, extorting, and shutting down other Russian SCP content creators. He has also committed several acts of copyright infringement (which is separate but related to trademark rights) by selling copies of SCP article texts and art explicitly derivative of SCP Foundation stories without releasing either under CC-BY-SA. I want to make clear to all reading that this man is not a threat to SCP Foundation content creators outside of Russia and the EACU states above, and that what he has done is both illegal within Russia and so brazen as to be impossible almost anywhere else in the world
Duksin has recently resumed his efforts to threaten and extort competitors, and has now begun to threaten SCP itself. He utilized the illegitimate trademark to shut down the official social media page of the Russian branch of the SCP Foundation Wiki, as well as a separate fan-page. The foundation attempted to negotiate with VK, the social media company in question, but so long as the trademark registration stands they will abide by it.
Now, Duksin has followed this by making a ridiculous demand to be administrator of the Russian wiki, and that said wiki be twisted into an advertisement for his merchandise rather than the writing community that it is.
These actions threaten not only the Russian community, but every SCP branch, writer, and fan around the world. We stand with SCP-RU, reject these threats, and are organizing a lawsuit against Duksin to annul his false trademark and prevent his continued copyright infringement. As an organization of volunteers, this is a measure we do not often pursue due to the costs involved.
Last May, when news of Duksin’s actions first became public, they received many offers from generous SCP fans offering to donate to a legal fund. At the time we did not accept any offers, as we believed the situation could be resolved via bureaucracy. With these new developments, this is no longer possible. As such, we humbly ask that anyone who loves SCP and has some money to spare donate to our legal fund in order to protect our global community. We are still finalizing the details of the fundraising, and will have a second round of announcements later in the week once the donation page is ready.
The SCP community has maintains a unified front against Duksin’s threats. They have also asked for help to spread the word about this situation on social media using the hashtag #standwithscpru.
