Copyright Law of The Soviet Union - 1928 Fundamentals

1928 Fundamentals

After only three years, new Fundamentals of Copyright Law superseded the 1925 version. The new Fundamentals were passed on May 16, 1928, and again the Union republics implemented them by passing their own compliant copyright acts afterwards. The 1928 law was similar to the 1925 one. It maintained the author's exclusive rights to publish, reproduce, distribute, and perform his works, and also his right to derive an income from such uses of his work. It took over from the 1925 law the list of free uses, including the freedom of translation, and also the cases involving compulsory licenses. The government reserved the right to nationalize a work without consent of the author. In practice, an author's exclusive rights to publish and distribute his works was restricted by the requirement to do so through official channels and by the state monopoly over the printing and publishing industries.

The copyright term was changed from 25 years following the first publication of a work to the lifetime of the author plus 15 years (15 years p.m.a.). This change was applied retroactively also to works that had already entered the public domain under the old term. Upon the death of an author, copyright passed onto his heirs or other legal successors. For certain kinds of works, shorter copyright terms applied. Periodicals, encyclopedias, choreographic works, movies and movie scripts, and collections of photographs were copyrighted for ten years from their first publication. Individual photographs were copyrighted for five years since their publication. Photographs were only copyrighted if they bore the name of the studio or the photographer, the address, and the year.

Individual republics of the USSR were free to devise their own rules for standard publication contracts and royalty schedules. Royalty collection and payment was centralized through a state agency founded in 1932 and named in 1938 the "All-Union Administration for the Protection of Copyrights", (VUOAP – Vsesoiuznoe upravlenie po ochrane avtorskich prav; Всесоюзное управление по охране авторских прав, ВУОАП). The VUOAP was placed under the auspices of the Union of Soviet Writers and managed literary works. Similar collecting societies existed for other kinds of works, such as compositions, movies, or works of the visual arts.

Under the 1928 Copyright Act, courts did not grant any damage claims by private persons for copyright infringement. The payment of fines to citizens instead of to the state was seen as contrary to communist doctrine. When damages were granted, they were to be paid to the state. Furthermore, the courts limited damage claims in copyright infringement cases to the sums defined by the existing standard schedules of remuneration issued by the government. If no schedule existed, no damages were awarded at all, even if the works were confirmed to be copyrighted.

Although Soviet law, from 1925 on until the demise of the Soviet Union (and also beyond in the successor states of the USSR), has always maintained that copyrights existed on a work regardless of its purpose or its value, the exercise of copyright in the Soviet Union was subject to the rules of censorship and the literary controls, the press legislation, the laws on printing, publishing, and selling, and Party directives. In general, only authors of "socially useful" works could exploit their copyrights; on "useless works" such as Church hymns no economic rights could be enforced; and authors of undesirable works faced administrative, or social, or even penal sanctions. What was "socially useful" was defined in a number of Party decrees (from 1925 to 1963, there were thirty-three such decrees). Publishers, film studios, and so on, were expected to refuse to publish works that were considered non-compliant to the currently valid definitions of the goals of artistic activity as defined by these decrees. In this way, the nominally exclusive rights of authors to publication were restricted by the need to go through the official channels and state-controlled publishing houses. As a way to bypass this governmental control for literary works samizdat developed: the non-commercial dissemination of a work in chain-letter fashion through carbon-copies produced by readers on their typewriters. Many samizdat works were considered to be "anti-Soviet agitation" by the authorities and the authors were prosecuted under article 58(10) (later articles 70 and 190(1)) of the RSFSR Criminal Code or corresponding provisions of the other republics' penal laws.

The copyright law of 1928 remained in effect essentially unchanged for more than thirty years. The numerous copyright-related decrees issued during this time concerned mostly administrative matters, such as the definition of the standard author's contracts for publication or the standard royalty tariffs. In 1957, a decree declared that for a posthumously rehabilitated author, the copyright term of 15 years was to begin to run at the date of his rehabilitation, not at the date of his death.