Russian Roulette?
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (APRIL 2001)
As
Russia’s book culture rebounds — witness the White Nights
International Book Fair, slated for June 27–30 in St.
Petersburg — copyright remains a needling concern. Yulia
Borodyanskaya of Rightscenter.com
reports from a recent conference meant to bolster awareness
of the nation’s intellectual property laws.
St. Petersburg is slowly but surely emerging as the
cultural capital of Russia, and it took a step further
during the frigid week of February 5, when it served
as ground zero for the Conference on Copyright in Culture
Management, Publishing, and Electronic Rights. The relevance
of such a conference is hard to underestimate, which
partly explains the firepower behind the event, whose
hosts included the St. Petersburg V.V. Nabokov Museum,
the Soros Foundation, and the US Consulate
General. Speaking to an impressive audience of museum
workers, book publishers, web designers, and theater
producers were a group of Russian and American copyright
experts, accompanied by guest of honor Dmitri Nabokov
himself.
The gauntlet flung down before this august body was
a report from the Gallup St. Petersburg Research
Company, which found in no uncertain terms that
knowledge of the Russian Copyright Law is limited. After
conducting in-depth interviews with leading print and
electronic publishers in Russia, researchers found that
97% of respondents agreed with the statement that Russia
has a problem adhering to copyright law. Moreover, many
did not possess concrete knowledge about the law and
the precise fields it regulates. While heads of publishing
houses and cultural institutions may harbor general
opinions and ideas about copyright protection, they
do not possess enough formal knowledge of it, the report
concluded.
And that’s a problem. With a total of over 1,635 publishing
houses registered in Russia (though this number doesn’t
include publishers in other republics of the former
Soviet Union, and estimates of active Russian publishers
have ranged as high as 4,000) there are at least 1,200
based in Moscow and another 200 in St. Petersburg, all
of them heavily engaged in buying literary rights. Among
these 1,400, there are at least 100 large publishers,
each with an average of 30 rights licenses annually;
500 medium publishers, with at least 3 licenses annually;
and 200 small publishers, with at least one license
annually. The amount of advances varies from a high
of $2,000–$3,000 per license down to $500 per license,
depending on the size of the house. In a market still
dominated by five foreign sub-agents representing US
or UK firms, Russian publishers say, the challenges
of complying with copyright laws — searching for authors
and their heirs (both Russian and foreign), seeking
permission to use intellectual property, and estimating
a fee for such use — remain daunting.
Those inside the Russian book industry attribute many
shortcomings to the bottleneck created by what some
call a monopoly of the five sub-agents, four of which
— the Andrew Nurnberg Agency, the Permission
and Rights Agency, the E. Van Lear Agency,
and the Alexander Korzhenevsky Agency — are said
to control almost 66% of all book rights brought into
Russia. While dutifully representing a large number
of Western proprietors, these sub-agents aren’t able
to handle all rights requests they receive from Russian
publishers, particularly for properties they do not
represent. Some critics charge that the bottleneck leads
to financial and ethical improprieties with respect
to copyright. Publishers also say it’s “next to impossible”
to hire an experienced in-house foreign rights agent
in Russia. And some plead with Western agencies and
publishers to make direct liaisons with Russian copyright
buyers.
As the Gallup research warned, the road to compliance
may be a long one. When asked if a legal framework for
copyright law in the St. Petersburg region would be
feasible, 40% of respondents expressed confidence, but
40% doubted that any such system could be organized.
“The avoidance of copyright is based on purely economic
relations between the author, publisher, and author-executor,”
one respondent candidly observed. “If it is profitable
to violate copyright, it will be violated.”
Still, the mere fact that many copyright disputes are
nowadays taken to the Russian Civil Courts is an achievement
in itself. Local copyright defenders have also cheered
the launch of the excellent Russian Copyright Monitoring
website (in both Russian and English at www.copyright-monitoring.ru),
which is now a destination for Russian publishers and
other cultural managers involved with the copyright
of intellectual property. The site gives step-by-step
instructions on how to obtain a permission to reproduce
or perform a copyrighted work, and provides a platform
for discussion of the complex regulations. Such tools
seem a promising start in addressing what most parties
agree is the real impediment to copyright in Russia
— a dearth of practical information about the laws and
their consequences.
©2001
Publishing Trends
