SOVIET PERIOD FILMS IN TODAY’S COPYRIGHT LAW: GERMAN AND BALTIC EXPERIENCE

Abstract

1. Introduction Within society, films (1) have several functions. They serve as mass media, still most essential today, apart from the internet. They are a form of artistic expression, and an economical factor. While its function as mass media has always been dominant since the creation of the first 'motion pictures' around 1900--and therefore served as an ideal propaganda tool for various regimes--the importance of the artistic and the economic aspect changed over time. In the Soviet Union, the value of films and movies as means of information, education and propaganda was realized from its earliest days. Mosfilm, founded in 1920, as the oldest European film studio and long being the largest one (Mosfilm homepage), started production in the early twenties, and many of the movies created at that time--e.g. Battleship Potemkin by Sergey Eisenstein--are acknowledged not only as extremely popular in cinemas all over Europe (ideally fulfilling its mass media function), but also as a 'cinematographic gem', i.e. they were setting standards in the film's function as a form of artistic expression as well. As the state holds the monopoly on the film production and as much of its ideology was transmitted via these media, the function of this branch as the central mass medium was maintained throughout the Soviet period. Compared with the development of non-Soviet films, which were dominated by Hollywood in the U.S. and several national studios in Western Europe, the artistic level of Soviet films was generally high, although a certain gradual decline could not be ignored. However, the most important contrast to non-Soviet films was that films and movies were not an economic factor in society (the third function mentioned above), effecting a very rudimentary regulation of all intellectual property issues inflicted with films and movies: at the time when Western European countries were involved in the gradual development of copyright law standards, based primarily on the Berne and Rome conventions, the countries belonging to the Soviet bloc--the German Democratic Republic (the GDR) and the three Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania--were following an utterly different path. These differences were based on two different predispositions, both based on the different economic-institutional structure of socialist states, particularly by the suppression of private property and the dominance of public property (see also Ulmer 1970:33-34). First of all, although copyright protection was recognised, the regulation of substantial copyright law issues had many peculiarities, hardly understandable from today's point of view. The countries in the Soviet Union did not join the Berne Convention or Rome Convention and the standard of copyright protection was lower--for example, related rights were not recognised at all, the term of protection was considerably shorter, (2) the restrictions of rights were much broader, remuneration for authors was regulated by administrative orders and so on. These differences were quite natural--as there was no free competition and market was controlled by the socialist state, there was no (and could never be) unfair competition in Soviet countries, which is, ultimately, the background for copyright legal regulation in every country which is based on the free market. On the other hand, the authors' and performers' pecuniary interests were secured via the social security schemes and labour law, as normally all of them had a labour contract and constant income and the amount of the latter was quite equal to that of all other categories of workers. (3) Secondly, the main copyright owner (and the main user of works) was the socialist state. As already indicated, normally all authors created works under a labour contract with organisations and all the organisations were state-owned, thus the state effectively collected the main part of copyrights. As far as films are concerned there was another layer of state interest. …