Namaskar/Salam
So the other day …. I fell, most unwillingly but quite happily, down a rather curious piece (though I confess I only truly read it now, as one does with the more tempting of intellectual distractions! Alas, life is such).
It was a piece from 1967 in the Duke Law Journal, a slender sixteen-page text … dressed in all the full regalia of the American law review tradition. I mean … the dense, deliberate, and detailedly footnoted text, as though the citations are contesting for attention with the text they adorn.
But there is something else as well that ignites my interest in this piece. For one, there is, I find, something rather beguiling about writing on Soviet copyright discourse. It remains strangely under-visited in English scholarship, or at least, not easily sighted in the usual mainstream historical scholarship. Perhaps it is hiding in some archives acloves, carrying the digital dust … awaiting more patient, more persistent pursuers. At times, I suspect I ought to search more earnestly; there is likely an entire cartography of thought yet unmapped.
Secondly, as I suggested above, I liked the citations of this piece, which detour into forgotten corners, pause for brief historical asides, and occasionally seem to breathe with a life of their own. One begins to feel (at least I did) that the author took greater pleasure in the footnotes than in the main text itself.
(Well … if one were ever inclined toward an IP trivia night, this is the sort of piece one would chip in, quietly and watch the room slowly realise that copyright discourse is far more entertaining than it had dared to assume.)
But I shall not linger in preamble any longer. Below follows the citation of the piece, and thereafter a fragment of its introduction
Citation: Allan P. Cramer, International Copyright and the Soviet Union, 1965 Duke Law Journal 531-545 (1965). Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol14/iss3/3
INTRODUCTION (footnotes omitted)
THE COPYRIGHT laws of a country have no extraterritorial application. Nevertheless, practically every nation in the world, by adherence to either bilateral or multilateral treaties or conventions, protects copyrights of foreign nationals. The Soviet Union alone among the major world powers has refused to recognise international copyright and does not adhere to any treaty or convention for the protection of copyrights. As a result, that country’s state-controlled publishing firms have, generally without seeking permission or paying royalties, printed whatever foreign works they felt were suitable for Soviet minds. During the period from 1917-1950, it has been estimated that one billion copies of books protected by foreign copyright were published in the Soviet Union. Among these were more than seventy-seven million copies of 2700 books by some 200 United States authors, including Jack London, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Erskine Caldwell, Sin-clair Lewis, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.” Numerous foreign scientific and technical publications, short stories, plays10 and miscellaneous articles¹¹ have also been published in the U.S.S.R. Thus, that country has been characterized as “the world’s most active literary pirate.”This article will consider various reasons for the Soviet Union’s position concerning international copyright. In addition, it will outline some attempts which have been made to change the Soviet view and evaluate future prospects for the solution of the problem.
Do take a look at the piece. Happy reading …
See you in the next post.
A bientôt.
IP Musings 