In 2006, completely rewritten intellectual property laws were included in part IV of a new Civil Code of the Russian Federation.
[6] The new legislation on copyrights in chapter IV of 1991 Fundamentals was passed as law on March 31, 1991 and scheduled to enter in force on January 1, 1992.
Chapter IV of the 1991 Fundamentals was thus in effect for exactly one year until on August 3, 1993, the new Copyright law of Russia entered in force.
The main innovations were much more detailed regulations on neighbouring rights, the adaptation of the law to new technologies, an expansion of contractual freedom, and provisions on collecting societies.
[11] Under the 1993 law, copyright covers works of the sciences, literature, and the arts that are the result of creative activity and that exist in objective form.
Among the examples of derivative works listed in the law are translations, abstracts, reviews, dramatizations, and arrangements.
Finally, purely informational reports on events and facts are not copyrightable, a provision corresponding to article 2(8) of the Berne Convention.
If such a report goes beyond the purely factual and includes any commentary, analysis, prediction or other interpretation it is subject to copyright again.
Employers are required to pay the author royalties for each and every use of the work, but the parties are free to determine this fee and may set it arbitrarily low.
If their separate contributions to the work can be used independently, each author may use his part of the whole as he sees fit to do, unless there are contractual obligations to the contrary among the co-authors.
For movies, the law exhaustively enumerates all the initial copyright holders: the director, the author of the script, and the composer of the film music, if any.
[29] In collective works such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, but also newspapers, magazines, periodicals, or also databases, the compiler is granted a copyright on the selection or arrangement, if either are creative.
Exempted from this are reproductions of architectural works, databases, computer programs (but archive copies, i.e., backups are allowed), and musical scores.
As in the Berne Convention, reproducing extracts from a legally disclosed work as a quote is allowed, but the amount copied must be more than necessary for the intended purpose (news reporting, teaching, criticism, reviews, and so on).
[45] Another free use concerns the freedom of panorama: works of the visual arts, photography, or architecture that are permanently installed in publicly accessible places (which includes museums or exhibition halls)[46] may be reproduced if the work is not the main subject of the reproduction and if the reproduction is used only non-commercially.
[47] The neighbouring rights, introduced for the first time in the 1991 Fundamentals, were much expanded and clarified in the 1993 copyright law, following the provisions of the Rome Convention and in some cases also the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT).
[60] Concerning the neighbouring rights, the term of protection was fifty years since the original performance or broadcast.
[68] Unless the contract explicitly includes a sub-licensing permission, a licensee may not transfer some or all of the licensed rights to a third party.
[76] In a ruling in 2006, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation confirmed the retroactivity of the 1993 law, explaining that it placed even works under copyright again if their old, Soviet 25-year term had already expired.
Because of the term extension of four years for authors who had lived during the Great Patriotic War, even some earlier works became subject to copyright.
524 of May 29, 1998, which was published on June 16, 1998, clarified that for movies created before August 3, 1992, the film studios were no longer considered the authors, as had been the case under the old Soviet law.
[81] The decree explicitly declared that these authors were entitled to receive royalties for uses of these films (broadcast, whether by cable or wireless, reproduction, distribution (including rental), and showing to the public) and defined a remuneration schedule expressed in percentages of the income generated by the use of the works.
[91] Since its foundation as an independent successor state of the former Soviet Union, the Russian Federation had been engaged in a large legislative project of developing a new Civil Code.
Part I of this new Civil Code of the Russian Federation was signed into law on November 30, 1994, by President Boris Yeltsin and became effective on January 1, 1995.
[94] Part IV of the Civil Code took several years to work out and was submitted to the State Duma in July 2006.
[95] The draft of the new intellectual property legislation was heavily criticized for being too unclear and for conflicting with Russia's international obligations, and also for introducing several untested novelties.
231-FL)[100] was signed on the same day;[98] it declared part IV of the Civil Code to enter in force on January 1, 2008 with the effect of invalidating and replacing all previous intellectual property legislation.
With the exception of the Implementation Act discussed below, most changes were clarifications of omissions or of disputed points in the 1993 law.
[104] A subtle change concerned the calculation of the copyright term for posthumously published works, which began newly from the disclosure instead of from the publication.
[105] The new legislation also no longer contained a provision for a "domaine publique payant" as the 1993 Copyright Act did in its article 28(3).