Lawyers on behalf of Huberman staged a hunt for second-hand book dealers

A new kind of “money taking” from the population

Dozens of Russian second-hand book dealers seem to have faced a new kind of “taking money from the population”. On behalf of Igor Guberman, representatives of the Moscow Authors’ Club (MAC) are suing them under the pretext of protecting the poet’s copyright.

The scheme is quite simple: an agent of the “authors club” looks for advertisements for the sale of books by Igor Guberman on Internet trading platforms, then the IAC makes a “test purchase”, after which it sends the seller a claim for violation of exclusive rights and demands compensation. Considering such a claim to be insignificant, and the amount (from 200 thousand rubles) to be too high, second-hand booksellers do not respond to it. Then the IAC sues them, demanding payment of the requested amount, as well as legal costs.

Everything looks quite simple and logical: if copyright is violated, pay. But it’s not. Second-hand booksellers sell books that they previously bought themselves. And once a book is sold once, the copyright on it automatically terminates. But not all book dealers are legally savvy, and this is what IAC uses.

Muscovite Pavel Temichev became one of the first goals of the “Author’s Club”. MAK bought the book “Gariki for every day” from him and went to court. Among the documents presented by the club is an agreement with the inventor of “gariks” on transferring the right to claim compensation for copyright infringement to MAK, a certified copy of the poet’s Israeli passport (he has lived in Tel Aviv for a long time). Plus some other documents.

In accordance with the agreement, 80% of the amount that the “violator” will have to pay will go to the club, the rest – to the poet. They demand 200,000 rubles from Mr. Temichev, 10,000 rubles for each chapter of the book. And as an argument for the validity of the requirements, they attach an article by Dmitry Bykov (recognized as a foreign agent) “Air Bubbles”, on the basis of which it is concluded that each “garik” is an independent literary work.

At the same time, the club’s lawyers filed a motion to hear the case in a simplified manner. This means that the judge can make a decision only on the basis of the documents provided by the plaintiff and the defendant. And if the court considers that the plaintiff is right, then the book dealer will simply receive a notice that he owes MAK 200 thousand.

The club was unlucky with Temichev: he is a former law enforcement officer and quickly figured out the situation. In his claim to the lawsuit, he pointed out all the inconsistencies in the statement. At the same time, I contacted those to whom such claims had been filed earlier. All of them are filed on behalf of Huberman, the scheme is the same everywhere. It has not yet been possible to find out whether the author of the “Gariks” himself knows about the antics of the club. The book dealer asked the court to establish whether the poet crossed the Russian border at the time when, according to the IAC, he signed the contract. Huberman has a rather simple signature, it can be easily forged.

However, the unfinished history of the Moscow second-hand bookseller is still an exception. If at the moment when he found out that he was being sued, there were only 5 such lawsuits, now there are several dozen such lawsuits in the courts of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Ulyanovsk, Tomsk and other regions of the country. The business can become quite profitable.

The editors have at their disposal all the documents on the Temichev case, as well as another book dealer from the capital.