A draft law on the protection of copyright violators of copyright has been developed

They will also be able to seek compensation for piracy

The unconditional protection of the copyright of translators, compilers or other authors of derivative or composite works will be ensured by the adoption of a new law, the draft of which was submitted to the lower house of parliament by the Government of Russia. The decision of the Constitutional Court of Russia became the basis for the introduction.

As it became known to MK, the story began with the appeal of the programmer Anton Mamichev to the Primorsky District Court of St. Petersburg. He filed a lawsuit against his former employer, a subsidiary of a Swiss software company. The programmer said that the company had been using the program he developed for two years without his consent. Mamichev won the court of first instance – according to the decision of the judge, the organization had to pay the plaintiff more than 1.57 million rubles. for the use of this program, plus compensation for providing access to its copy to third parties – 17.5 thousand rubles. In addition, the court exacted almost 2.26 million rubles in favor of Mamichev from the Swiss company and its subsidiary companies as compensation for the reproduction of the program. and banned companies from using the program in the future. However, in the court of appeal this decision was canceled on the grounds that the plaintiff used other programs to create his work without obtaining permission from their authors. And one of the provisions of the Civil Code determines that “the author of a derivative or composite work exercises his copyright subject to the rights of the authors of the works.” Therefore, the citizen was denied recognition of his copyright.

Then the programmer appealed to the Constitutional Court with a complaint in which he asked to check the constitutionality of the provisions of the Civil Code. The judges, having examined the issue, decided that it, allowing the deprivation of copyright on the basis that the work is a composite, violates a number of provisions of the Constitution. Therefore, the court ruled that the legislator should make changes to the code that would eliminate the contradiction and reconsider the programmer’s case when this is done.

The bill submitted to the State Duma states that if a derivative or composite work has been used illegally, then both the rights of its author and the rights of the authors of the works on which it is based are subject to protection.