Lecture
First and foremost, the subject of copyright is the author, i.e. the natural person by whose creative labour the work was created. The arising of the author's rights does not depend on legal capacity, age, state of health, the release of the work to the public, etc. A foreign citizen becomes a subject of copyright in the Russian Federation if his work has been released to the public on the territory of the Russian Federation or, if it has not been released, is located on its territory in some objective form. In all other cases the copyright of a foreign citizen will be protected only where there is a relevant international treaty.
The successors in title of authors are also recognised as subjects of copyright. These are persons to whom individual powers of the author pass by inheritance, by operation of law, or under a contract with the author. The author's successors in title may be:
1) natural persons who have acquired the author's rights by inheritance. The right of authorship, the right to a name and the right to protection of the author's reputation do not pass by inheritance. The heirs are only entitled to protect the said rights;
2) legal entities may acquire individual rights of the author in the following situations:
where a work is created in the course of the performance of employment duties, the rights to use the work belong to the person who employed the author;
where publishing houses issue encyclopaedias, newspapers, magazines, collections of scholarly works and other serial publications, they acquire the right to use the work as a whole, as well as in other cases;
3) the State becomes a subject of copyright in the event of the liquidation of a legal entity that held the copyright, where the State becomes the successor of the holder of the copyright, and in other cases.
Where a work has been created by the creative labour of several persons, it is customary to speak of co-authorship. The copyright in such a work belongs to the co-authors irrespective of whether such a work forms a single whole or consists of parts each of which has independent significance.
Co-authorship in a work arises where a second person makes his contribution to the creation of the work at any stage of the creative process. However, such a contribution must meet the requirement of the creative nature of the work. Technical assistance to the author (retyping the manuscript, an interlinear translation, etc.) is not creative in nature and therefore does not give rise to co-authorship.
Co-authorship may be divisible or indivisible. Divisible co-authorship means the authorship of several persons in a work consisting of separate independent parts which can be used independently of one another. Examples are the music and the lyrics of a song, the text and the illustrations of a book, or different chapters of a textbook where it is indicated who worked on which chapter. The author of a part of a collective work holds the copyright in that part and may use it separately from the other parts, unless otherwise provided by agreement.
Indivisible co-authorship is a situation where the copyright in the work as a whole belongs to the co-authors jointly. Where the co-authors' work forms a single indivisible whole, none of the co-authors is entitled, without sufficient grounds, to prohibit the use of the work.
Copyright in a work created in co-authorship runs for the lifetime and 70 years after the death of the last surviving co-author.
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