Copyright Law of The Soviet Union - Copyright Act of 1925

Copyright Act of 1925

The legal situation concerning copyright in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s was confused. The Tsarist copyright law was still partially in effect, but its status was unclear. There were a number of decrees affecting copyright, but there was no unified legal treatment. The new Civil Law of the Russian SFSR, which became effective on January 1, 1923, did not contain any provisions on copyright either. In 1924, the Council of People's Commissars launched a project to develop a new copyright statute. On January 30, 1925, the Central Executive Committee passed the new Fundamentals of Copyright Law. These "Fundamentals" (Osnovy—Основы) were to serve as a model law for the laws of the individual republics of the Soviet Union, which all—with the exception of the Ukrainian SSR—passed laws implementing the Fundamentals at the republic level in 1925/26; the RSFSR Copyright Act was passed on October 11, 1926. All these republics' laws did not deviate from the Fundamentals. Only in the Azerbaijan SSR were the copyright provisions included in the Civil Code of the republic; in all other SSRs, the act was a separate ad-hoc piece of legislation.

The 1925 Copyright Act provided for a general copyright term of 25 years since the first publication of a work. If an author died before that period had expired, the heirs were granted the right to receive royalties according to the schedules established by the government for the shorter of the remaining part of the 25-year term or during 15 years. If a work was published after the author's death, this right was limited to a term of 15 years from the posthumous publication. For some specific classes of works, such as encyclopedias, photographs, or also choreographic and pantomimic works the copyright term was shorter than the general 25-year period.

The law recognized the exclusive right of the author to publish, reproduce, and distribute his work, and also his right to remuneration, i.e., the right to receive royalties for uses of a work. The law included provisions enabling authors to transfer copyrights for a limited time (five years) to a publisher by contract; only publishing contracts with state, trade union, or Party publishing houses could be of unlimited duration. The contract had to specify precisely the intended use of the work, the number of copies printed, the royalties to be paid, etc. The allowed range of the amount of royalties was prescribed in governmental remuneration schedules.

The copyrights of an author were limited by a large array of free uses allowed without the author's consent. Amongst these free uses was the "freedom of translation", which had already existed in the old Tsarist copyright law. A translation of any work could be done without the author's consent, and the translator was granted a separate and independent copyright on the translation. This provision was, already before Soviet times, motivated by the desire to ensure an economically viable way to translate works between the many national languages of the country. A decree on March 16, 1927 clarified that radio broadcasts of theater or concert performances were also admissible free uses. Compulsory licenses also existed in the 1925 Copyright Act. Public performances of a published work, for instance, were allowed without the author's consent, but were subject to the payment of the standard royalties. The government also reserved the right to forcibly nationalize any work.

Another characteristic that Soviet copyright law inherited from the Tsarist law was that copyright was automatic: copyright began with the creation of the work (not its completion or publication), and was not subject to registration. Copyright covered all literary and musical works as well as works of the arts and scientific works and also films by Soviet citizens, as well as works by foreign authors that were first published in the Soviet Union or, if unpublished, existed there in some objective form, irrespective of the author's nationality. An "objective form" was any form that permitted the reproduction of the work without any involvement of the original author. Only creative works were subject to copyright; works of a purely technical nature such as telephone directories, business correspondence, accountants' statements, but also court decisions or decrees, did not fall under copyright. Soviet courts interpreted this creativity requirement liberally; requiring only a minimal creative effort. A work created by a minimal paraphrase of an existing text could already be considered a new work eligible to copyright.