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 Three years later, it was superseded by a second version that remained in force for more than three decades, until it was replaced in 1961.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.Levitsky p. 28. Only creative works expressed in some objective form were subject to copyright.Levitsky p. 100ff.Newcity p. 53ff. 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limited to works of Soviet citizens and to works by foreign authors that were first published in the USSR (or, if unpublished, existed in objective form on the territory of the Soviet Union).Levitsky p. 50ff.Newcity p. 60ff. The economic rights of authors were limited by a long list of uses that did not constitute copyright infringements,Levitsky p. 15. 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 (as a republic within 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.
Revolutionary Copyright The old Tsarist Copyright law of 1911 was not immediately invalidated after the October Revolution. The old law, with its copyright term of 50 years after the author's death and its possibility of transferring copyrights in their entirety from an author to a publisher, continued to be valid initially.Levitsky p. 31.Newcity p. 18.Elst p. 73. But the nationalizations in all areas of the economy soon considerably restricted the avenues through which an author could publish her or his work, even if her or his copyright remained initially untouched. All publishing activities were placed under the supervision of the State Publishing house by a decree of May 21, 1919. On July 29, 1919, the government declared a state monopoly on unpublished works of deceased authors; and on April 20, 1920, all books (including those in private possession) were nationalized, except those in public libraries. Theatres and film studios as well as the photographic industry were nationalized in August 1919. Private publishing houses were eventually liquidated as well.Levitsky p. 33. The right to translate foreign publications into Russian was also monopolized by the government.Newcity p. 20.
Nationalizations of works In the interest of public education, the new Communist regime wanted to widely (and inexpensively) disseminate classic Russian literature to the masses. Toward this end, a decree was issued December 29, 1917 (Gregorian date) enabling the People's Commissariat for Education to nationalize works of deceased authors (including composers).Elst p. 72. On February 14, 1918, the works of 58 deceased authors were nationalizedLevitsky p. 31. (RSFSR Law 201)—including, among others, Chekhov, Chernyshevsky, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Herzen, Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.Elst p. 72. The mentioned authors' works were later covered again by the decree of January 18, 1923, by which the state monopoly on publishing them was made perpetual. The government established a state monopoly on the publication of these authors' works for a period of five years, which was later extended by another five years. A second nationalization decree of November 26, 1918 extended the powers of the People's Commissariat for Education to nationalize also works of living authors. The decree granted the commissariat a perpetual monopoly to the publication rights of such nationalized works; living authors were to receive royalties based on the standard remuneration schedules established by the government, while the royalties on works by deceased authors went to the state. Based upon this second decree, a number of nationalizations occurred in the following years. On August 16, 1919, the works of the seventeen composers Arensky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Cui, Kalinnikov, Laroche, Lyadov, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rubinstein, Sakketi, Scriabin, Serov, Smolensky, Stasov, and Taneyev were nationalized.Levitsky p. 32.Newcity p. 19. On January 18, 1923, the works of Mikhail Bakunin and 46 further authors were nationalized. A third decree on May 14, 1925 nationalized the works of Georgi Plekhanov and also the Russian translations of the works of Upton Sinclair, and finally, on June 28, 1927, the Marx-Engels Institute was granted a publication monopoly on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Legislative changes Legislative decrees invalidated some—but not all—of the provisions of the Tsarist copyright law. In the context of the general abolition of legal and testimonial succession rights, the nationalization decree of November 26, 1918 also reduced the copyright term from the 50 years p.m.a. (—"after the author's death") of the Tsarist copyright law to the lifetime of the author.Levitsky p. 32. Levitsky also writes that during the six months following an author's death, his works could not be published at all, not even if they had been nationalized. Assignments of copyrights in their entirety were invalidated by a decree of October 10, 1919. Under the Tsarist law, an author could transfer his copyrights to a publisher; under Soviet doctrine, this was not possible: an author could only grant a publisher a time-limited publication right, a principle that would hold throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the contracts to be used were standardized and a fixed schedule for royalties was defined by a decree of October 25, 1918.
Copyright in itself was upheld, though: works that had not been nationalized could only be used or reproduced with the consent of the author. Nationalized works could only be published with the consent of the People's Commissariat for Education, to which a publisher also had to pay a fee according to a fixed schedule.
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.Newcity p. 21. On January 30, 1925, the Central Executive Committee passed the new Fundamentals of Copyright Law.Elst p. 74. These "Fundamentals" (—) 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 SSRNewcity p. 21. The Ukrainian SSR enacted its first own copyright law on February 6, 1929; implementing the 1928 Fundamentals.—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.Newcity p. 29. In the case of discrepancies between any union-wide legislation and the laws of a republic, the federal law prevailed. This basic principle was expressed clearly for the first time in the Constitution of the Soviet Union in 1936, in article 20 of the so-called Stalin Constitution. In the Constitution of 1977, article 74 covered this principle. 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.Levitsky p. 34. 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.Newcity p. 21. Neither Elst, nor Levitsky, nor Newcity give any indication of how long these reduced terms in the 1925 copyright act were.
The law recognized the exclusive right of the author to publish, reproduce, and distribute his work,Elst p. 74. "Publication" did not imply "distribution" in Soviet law. A work was "published" if it was presented to a wider public; this might include a theater performance, a public reading, or a radio broadcast. This is a much broader concept of "publication" than was and is customary in Western countries; in the United States, for example, a work is "published" if copies of the work are distributed to the general public in a tangible medium. 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.Elst p. 75. The allowed range of the amount of royalties was prescribed in governmental remuneration schedules.Levitsky p. 142ff.
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.Newcity p. 22. 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.