Copyright and the digital world
In December 2016 my colleagues and I published a book “The digital future of the culture: measurements and forecasts”. The book presents research results on the benefits and threads for culture in digitizing world. Those, who read Russian, can download a full text here for free. The rest of the audience is welcome to read my posts with the main results of our research.
While investigating the content consumption we focused on books, movies, music and art as the product and on the Internet, TV, libraries and museums as distribution channels. The content, created in the Soviet Union challenges Russia a specific problem. Much of this content was created under the public funding with the efforts of many now foreign citizens — people from the Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Uzbekistan and so on. But, an access to this content is now limited by the copyright. First, many works moved to private hands as a result of the Soviet property privatization. Second, part of the works are now de facto orphans. “De facto” means no one claims a copyright, though both the author and the publisher are known. De jure, however, one can read the author and the publisher on the cover of the book for example, but contacting them is a challenging task. This is because of renaming and bankruptcy of publishers, movements of authors and a huge volume of the content to be processed. So, the easiest way is to do nothing. It results in exclusion of the millions of works form the consumption.
As a first step of our research we estimated the volume of the content that is missing in consumption, the volume of the archived collections and the structure of demand for the Soviet works. The estimation is based on the interviews, public statistics, sociological research and measurements of the digital consumption. We revealed:
· about 1,5 million of video (movies, TV shows, documentaries, etc.),
· more than 3,5 million records (songs, music, lectures, etc.) with approximately 40 thousands of Soviet songs named in the registries of the Russian organisations for collective rights management,
· about 4 million books issued in the USSR,
· approximately 7 million arts in the Russian museums related to the Soviet period as well as about 16 million of photos and documents.
Less of these items are digitized: up to 40% of video, 7% of audio records, 20% of books and 40% of art. Even less are available in the Internet. The online access to the Soviet works is important at least for two reasons:
· Libraries, archives and TV-program can not satisfy all the audience due to the physical reasons. Buildings are limited in space and TV-program is limited in time — they can not supply the desired content at the desired time harming the consumption.
· A lot of people read, watch and listen Soviet content from abroad. According to our analysis of peers in the torrent-network, about 40% of Soviet content downloads come from abroad. All the former USSR-countries also share the Soviet culture and their citizens want to access the Soviet heritage. And the Internet is a good media for that.
As we argue this is a copyright that hinders the digitizing and an access to the cultural heritage. In the upcoming articles I demonstrate that commercial benefits from Soviet content in the Internet are less disturbed by the illegal consumption. Also I demonstrate that an explosive demand and high revenue last only short period of time compared the copyright terms. To conclude this article I present the estimated revenue of right holders in the Internet due to the Soviet content.
The Russian law allows very tricky collective right management. There are organisations who collect royalties in favor of all authors — even those, who did not made an agreements with these organisations. There are only four organisations of such type: one collects in favor of musicians, the second — for phonograph producers and performers, the third collects for authors from hardware retailers (not from the public performance as opposed to the previous organisations) and the fourth collects royalties in transactions of arts. Only the first two organisations collect royalties due to performance, including the consumption in the Internet. These organisations publish annual reports. Annual royalties and valid sociological data about digital consumption underlie the estimation of the cash flow coming from the Internet. Soviet right holders get only 2% of revenue from the Internet. In 2014 organisations reported 8,2 bln. Russian rubles collected (approximately 210 mln. US dollars). And only 67,2 mln. rubles (1,7 mln US dollars) were attributed to the Internet. Less than 2 millions of dollars annually — this stake prevents open access to the Soviet heritage. We do not argue for the copyright cancellation. We argue to release the Soviet heritage from the copyright in the Internet. Let the right holders to collect the rest 98% of the stake. But people should have an access to the Soviet content. And two million dollars annually is a fair compensation for digitization and an open access, that promote cultural heritage storage, education and creativity.
