On the Implementation of the Principle of Dualism of Intellectual Law in Co-authorship

Abstract

The relevance of the conducted research is conditioned by the absence of legislative stipulation of the procedure and criteria of evaluation of the creative contribution of co-authors in the single result of their creative activity, as well as by the inconsistency of some cited court arguments, including the impossibility to create a photograph by several authors. In fact, the legislative definition of the notion of co-authorship, given in art. 1258 of the Civil Code of Russian Federation, is not substantial and functional: it lacks the essential and distinctive features and does not reflect the essence of this phenomenon, which makes it difficult to determine the contribution of each author and to evaluate it. In this paper we explore the notion of co-authorship, both in terms of its semantic meaning and in terms of the creative process. Co-authorship is examined using the example of the creation of a photograph as an object of copyright. In fact, the subject of the study is the relationship of established co-creation in photography and exclusive rights to it. The methods of analysis, inductive and comparison with the legislation of foreign countries were used. The main attention is paid to the analysis of judicial practice in the settlement of disputes on the violation of exclusive rights to photographic images, judicial explanation concerning the co-authorship and other similar in nature relationships arising in the process of creating an intellectual creative product (photography). Conclusions are drawn on the relationship between court-established infringement of exclusive rights and the recognition of copyright, legal dualism as the relationship between exclusive and copyright in the court's recognition of co-authorship or lack thereof.