October Revolution of 1917 entailed historical social change in the former Russian empire including the radical modification of the law. The new revolutionary government disregarded all obligations undertaken by the previous imperial as well as provisional governments613 and started the new legal history of the newly emerged state. Literature and
art, in general, because of its influence on the public, was considered important by the Bolshevik party and it was also important to make it serve the purposes of the proletarian movement.614 Therefore an adoption of new Soviet copyright legislation has been started as
early as on 29th December 1917, when the first Soviet copyright decree “On State Publishing”
had been issued by the Central Executive Committee.615 With this first decree the State
Committee on Education nationalized the works of certain Russian authors and declared a state monopoly on their publication, in other words – took these works “from the sphere of private property to the sphere of the community”616. This first Soviet legislative text
concerning copyright already shows the trend which the Soviet legislation was going to follow for the upcoming years and decades. The same decree initiated the flow of nationalization of the objects of copyright.
The trend of nationalizing the works of Russian authors was continued by another decree issued on 26 November 1918, according to which the government nationalized “all works of science, literature, music, or art, whether published or unpublished, no matter in whose
613 Levitsky, the Beginnings of Soviet Copyright Legislation, p. 49. 614 Newcity, p. 17.
615 Levitsky, Introduction to Soviet Copyright Law, p. 28. 616 Newcity, p. 17.
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possession they were”617. The difference between these first and second decrees is that the
second one applied to all works of science, literature, music and art of the authors, both living or deceased.618 According to this decree, the publication, circulation, or public
performance of all the nationalized works needed an express permission of the People’s Commissariat of Education.619 The decree created the basis for the issuance of several other
decrees during the next years in which the works of the prominent Russian musicians were declared to be the objects of the state monopoly.620 This flow of decrees was generally
intended to nationalize the works of art, literature, and music, by which it expressed the basic communist idea of owning the intellectual property not by the creator of this work, but by the Socialist society, at large.621
In its early years the newly emerged Soviet state faced numerous challenges in national and international levels which were reflected in the legislative acts of that period as well. In the international arena of ‘capitalist’ world RSFSR was a single actor with its different ideology and, therefore, it had to accept the common international standards, at least during the relations with other states. In the domestic level the country faced significant economic problems, so that in March 1921 Lenin had to initiate the New Economic Policy (NEP) in order to revive the economy, although it caused controversy within the state because of its incompatibility with the Marxist theory, while it allowed the cooperation with the hostile ‘capitalist’ countries.622 Therefore, the imposition of NEP was a significant compromise and
deviation from the ‘orthodox’ communist ideology which caused certain ambiguity and self- contradiction. The NEP tendency of approximating the law to Western standard was also reflected in the Soviet copyright legislation,623 since in May 1922 the laws governing
617 Levitsky, the Beginnings of Soviet Copyright Legislation, p. 51. 618 Newcity, p. 18.
619 Levitsky, Introduction to Soviet Copyright Law, p. 32. 620 Newcity, p. 19.
621 Levitsky, Introduction to Soviet Copyright Law, p. 69. 622 Mamlyuk, p. 546.
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invention and copyright were revised in order to provide property incentives to the enterprising inventor and author.624 Accordingly, an ambiguity and contradiction in the
ideology of the newly emerged state caused by NEP also affected copyright legislation.
In 1923 the Civil Code of RSFSR was enacted (adopted in October 1922, came into effect in January 1923), but it did not contain any part about copyright.625 Therefore, in order to
satisfy the need of codifying the copyright law, a draft of the fundamental principles of copyright law was endorsed in 1925 by the Central Executive Committee and the Council of the People’s Commissars, which officially embodied the Communist concept of copyright626
and based on which the Soviet republics promulgated their own copyright acts, and the RSFSR itself issued its own copyright act in October 1926.627 Although the tendency of
softening the radicalness of the Communist ideology was reflected in this act as well, it also reflected several principles which were typical for the Soviet concept of copyright, such as “freedom of translation” principle, inherited from Tsarist copyright law, according to which the government intended to unify the diverse national cultures available in multiple languages, which necessitated a policy of total freedom of translation.628 These basic
principles were left intact in the new copyright act of 1928, which although introduced certain new rules, such as an extension of the copyright protection from twenty-five years to the entire lifetime of the author, and a distribution of the jurisdiction between the federation and the union republics.629
The copyright act of 1928 stayed in force during more than three decades. However, the new developments caused several changes in it and the act had been amended until it became obvious that the attempts to modernize this act were no longer adequate.630 This led to the
624 Newcity, p. 20.
625 Levitsky, the Beginnings of Soviet Copyright Legislation, p. 59. 626 Bohmer, p. 1.
627 Levitsky, Introduction to Soviet Copyright Law, p. 34. 628 Newcity, p. 22.
629 Levitsky, Introduction to Soviet Copyright Law, p. 36. 630 Newcity, p. 29.
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fundamental reform of the civil legislation in the beginning of 1960-ies631, as a result of
which the Fundamentals of Civil Legislation was promulgated in 1961 and came into force in May 1962.632 With an adoption of the Fundamentals the early stage of the Soviet copyright
legislation was ended and the basis for next level had been created. Like the previous one (adopted in 1928), these new Fundamentals were also aimed to provide the basis for the new civil codes of the fifteen republics in the Soviet Union.633 An adoption of these fundamentals
has to be considered a part of reforms initiated in the Soviet copyright law before the accession to the UCC.
Accession of the USSR to the Universal Copyright Convention in 1973 had been a turning point for the development of the Soviet copyright law. As the USSR had been the world’s largest producer and consumer of printed works by that time,634 this accession certainly was
an event of an international significance. In order to be accessed to the UCC, certain fundamental amendments had to be made in the Soviet copyright legislation. These amendments turned out to have disruptive effect on the domestic copyright system, since it questioned the validity of certain fundamental concepts introduced in 1961-1964, and also caused unexpected difficulties regarding their interpretation.635 Although the USSR exercised
a legal manoeuvre and joined the UCC before the 1971 Paris amendments went into force, which made the exclusive rights and license rules even stricter,636 it did not help much to
save the Soviet copyright legislation from the necessity to make hasty and incomplete changes,637 which finally caused the greater inconsistence and ambiguity in the Soviet
copyright law. One of the results of these changes, for example, was a creation of dual system, according to which Soviet legislation applied for the domestic works while the
631 Levitsky, Soviet Copyright Law at the Crossroads p. 16. 632 Levitsky, Introduction to Soviet Copyright Law, p. 58.
633 Levitsky, Copyright, Defamation, and Privacy in Soviet Civil Law, p. 3. 634 Newcity, p. v.
635 Levitsky, Soviet Copyright Law at the Crossroads p. 5. 636 Mamlyuk, p. 564.
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foreign works were governed by the international law.638 Due to these changes and
amendments, Soviet copyright law deviated even further from its initial Communist ideology and principles.
A typical nature of Soviet copyright law is also expressed in the rule of distributing the jurisdiction between the federation and the union republics. According to the Copyright Act of 1928 the republics were empowered to establish their own rules concerning the variety of issues.639 The Fundamentals of Civil Legislation of 1961 also empowered the union republics
to establish their own rules.640 This might create an impression that the union republics were
able to define their domestic laws independently. However, there was a supremacy clause in the Soviet Constitution, according to which, “in case of contradiction between a law of a Union Republic and a law of the Union, the law of a Union should prevail”,641 and,
accordingly, in practice, the principles dictated by the USSR government had to be adopted by the union republics.642 Therefore, although the union republics had an official right to
define their domestic legislations on their own, in fact these legislations did not significantly differ neither from the law of the union, and, accordingly, nor from each other.