The Copyright law of the Soviet Union went through several major revisions during its existence. The first Socialist copyright law was passed in 1925. Three years later, it was superseded by a second version that remained in force for more than three decades, until it was replaced in 1961.
Throughout these various revisions of the law, some characteristics remained constant. Copyright was automatic in the USSR: a work was copyrighted from its creation, and registration was not needed. Only creative works expressed in some objective form were subject to copyright. The duration of copyright was much shorter than customary in the West. Copyright was, from the beginning, limited to works of Soviet citizens and to works by foreign authors that were first published in the USSR (or, if unpublished, existed in objective form on the territory of the Soviet Union). The economic rights of authors were limited by a long list of uses that did not constitute copyright infringements, and mandatory official royalty rates limited the income of authors. Soviet copyright law also granted the freedom of translation (until 1973): any work could be freely translated and then published without the original author's consent.
The accession of the USSR to the Universal Copyright Convention, which became effective on May 27, 1973, was a major turning point. Copyright was extended to also cover works of foreign authors that were first published abroad after that date, and the freedom of translation had to be abolished. For the first time in history, Russia (in the form of the Soviet Union) had joined a multilateral, international copyright treaty, ending the country's self-imposed isolation (but also its independence) in copyright matters.
During Perestroika, the law and the administrative procedures were changed piece by piece, relaxing the governmental control over authors' exercises of their copyright. The official royalty rates were dropped, and the state monopoly on foreign trade on copyrights was abolished. Authors for the first time could legally negotiate publication contracts with foreign publishers themselves. A new, profoundly revised Soviet copyright law was passed in 1991, but the Soviet Union was dissolved before it could enter in force.
Read more about Copyright Law Of The Soviet Union: Revolutionary Copyright, Copyright Act of 1925, 1928 Fundamentals, 1961 Fundamentals, Accession To The UCC in 1973, 1991 Fundamentals, Transition To Post-Soviet Legislation in Russia
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, law, soviet and/or union:
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“The law of nature is, do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)