The magazine was punished for reprinting someone else’s article

The author, a former employee of the Investigative Committee, appealed to the court

The Tverskoy District Court of the capital decided to satisfy the claim of the former first deputy head of the Main Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Alexander Rasstrygin, against the monthly publication of the Prosecutor General’s Office. The magazine “Zakonnost” will have to pay the plaintiff compensation for violation of the exclusive right and compensation for moral damage, as well as publish the court decision on its pages and indicate the name of the real author.

The stumbling block was the publication of an article devoted to the organizational and analytical work of the prosecutor’s office in the first issue of the magazine in 2013. The problem was that this article had previously been published in the collection of the Institute for Advanced Training of Management Personnel of the Academy of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation. Its author was Alexander Rasstrygin – then he worked as a prosecutor in Volgograd. After reprinting the article with minor changes, the magazine staff changed the title and did not indicate the name of the real author.

This became clear relatively recently. In March 2021, a claim was sent to the editors of the journal “Legality” for payment of compensation for copyright infringement and compensation for moral damage. Responding to the letter, the editor-in-chief indicated that the journal’s cooperation with the author who sent the revised article had been terminated. And the amount of compensation that the real author demands is too high. Therefore, his claim was left unsatisfied. A former employee of the Investigative Committee went to court. He estimated compensation for violation of the exclusive right to his work at 100 thousand rubles, and moral damages at 50 thousand rubles.

The court sided with him. True, the amount of compensation turned out to be more modest than Rasstrygin wanted: violation of rights – 5 thousand rubles, moral damage – 2 thousand rubles. In a conversation with MK, he explained that compensation is not the most important thing for him, but the restoration of justice is more important.