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, 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.
