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Становление советского авторского права
The building of the Soviet state began with the construction of new legal norms in the field of copyright: it abolished the inheritance of copyright, the state could nationalize any works. However, discussion accompanied the introduction of these norms in the ruling circles. In December 1917, there were still proposals to save the inheritance of copyright by reducing the term of their protection. Decrees 1917–1918 allowed the nationalization of works and eliminated the inheritance of copyright as well. After the author’s death, the work became a public domain. The nationalization of works pursued several tasks: first, the expansion and revitalization of publishing; secondly, the reduction in the cost of printed products; third, improvement of the cultural level of Soviet citizens. Soviet literature emphasized that the first decrees on copyright contributed to the release of authors who fell into material dependence on publishing houses. The state regulated the amount of minimum remuneration for the author. Contracts for which the exclusive rights to the publisher passed for an unlimited period, were recognized invalid. At the same time, in practice, there were also negative implications. The monopolization of the publication of works of Russian classical literature, notes and archives, textbooks deprived private publishing houses of a large number of orders, that led to their closure. The seizure of the rights to individual works by the state actually destroyed the author’s exclusive right to his creation: the author could not use his own result of intellectual activity at his own discretion. The construction of free use of the result of intellectual activity with the obligatory payment of the approved remuneration to the state replaced the exclusive right after the death of the author. The rights to works that were not subject to nationalization could be freely expropriated subject to certain conventions, that is, with respect to them, the author retained the exclusive right. By monopolizing works endowed with cultural value, the state set for them an obligatory ideological criterion: educational and agitational character. In such regulation of copyright relations you can notice an ambiguous situation. On the one hand, there is a devaluation of the author’s works, a restriction of his rights in relation to his own creation, a diminution of his economic interest. On the other hand, the state has to respond in this way to the urgent need for serious cultural education of workers and peasants, to terminate the already established relations between authors and publishers and to provide authors with minimal guarantees of receiving remuneration.