Russia Creates Agency to Rein In Cultural Piracy

Vowing to end Russia’s unchecked video and audio piracy, a new government agency charged with defending copyrights announced its birth on Tuesday and pledged to ensure that proper royalties are paid from now on.

“At issue is piracy on a colossal scale, in both video and sound recordings, and even in publishing recently,” said Mikhail Fedotov, director of the new Russian Intellectual Property Agency. “This is what our agency intends to fight.”

Cultural piracy here is so widespread and brazen that many major U.S. film studios stopped licensing films for this market last year and boycotted the Moscow Film Festival last July in protest. Russian video salons and cable channels regularly show bootleg Western movies. Radio channels play Western music freely without paying royalties. Pirated compact discs and books ranging from “Gone With the Wind” to “The Joy of Sex” abound.

But the time has come, Fedotov said, “to really bring legal order to this area.” The agency plans to triple or quadruple the current number of only 135 inspectors nosing into video salons and checking book warehouses for copyright violations. It hopes to push laws to penalize businesses of profits made by violating copyrights, requiring them to pay such income to the wronged artist.

The old Soviet legal code included prohibitions against copyright infringement, but agency officials said no violators had been charged in the 74-year Soviet history.

“Our task is to defend the author, especially in terms of public performances, and to create a whole system for the gathering and distributing of royalty payments,” agency Deputy Director Eduard Renov said.

Current estimates put royalty losses due to copyright violations at 1.5 billion rubles per year ($10 million at current rates). But agency officials said Russian losses could equal those in America, where piracy is estimated to cost $1 billion a year.

The Russian Intellectual Property Agency is the descendant of the hated Soviet agency known as VAAP (the Russian acronym for All-Union Agency of Authors’ Rights). It was shameless in expropriating almost all royalties that Soviet authors, composers and artists earned abroad. To avoid such pilferage, the new Russian agency will include a committee of artists--rather than its own bureaucrats--who will decide what percent of royalties the agency deserves in exchange for its services, Fedotov said. Officials said it will be between 10% and 33%.

Agency officials said they plan to lobby for Russia to join worldwide conventions on copyrights, and emphasized they would seek to defend foreign copyrights as energetically as their own.