Epidemic - a telltale shot for cultural and scientific values

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The coronavirus epidemic, according to Alexander Auzan, Dean of the Faculty of Economics at Moscow State University, has radically accelerated the digitalization of society. The regime of self-isolation and quarantine led to a sharp modification of the social space, when all the mobility of society and the ability to participate in any interactions was, as a rule, provided by new media and communication channels.

The new situation exacerbated the contradictions where they were not noticeable to a few: our history, expressed in the form of books (especially books of the twentieth century, which are still subject to copyright), was simply taken out of circulation. Unlike films of Soviet studios, which can often be found legally on YouTube (they are monetized by advertising), music collections are often made available without any legal subtleties and nuances, and sometimes without mentioning the author - on social networks and torrents, where they still live. libertarian epic of the early Internet community.

The zigzags of history, large-scale repressions and human sacrifices, as can be seen today, have cost us dearly - more than just losses, if we even lose the memory of them. This deprives our society of history and deepens the generational gap with the gap between media platforms, which were unable to overcome the works, the author or copyright holder of which cannot be determined.

Of course, the law on copyright is important, understanding the rights of the Author as human rights is necessary, they need to be protected, but even here everything turns out to be not so simple. First, at the time of the creation of works, for example, in the twentieth century - until 1993, when a new law was adopted - the law was different. The USSR gave authors 25 years to receive remuneration, and only after joining the Berne Convention, the rights began to last 50 years after the death of the author, and then all 70. However, few of the authors managed to make money on this. The largest copyright holders, like Eduard Uspensky, lost their rights in confrontation with state structures. Others could not make money because, together with the USSR, the highly profitable publishing business quickly disappeared, and the epidemic is striking another blow to it. The protection of the author's rights has turned into a priority of copyright as the right to make money on works that often do not belong to the authors themselves (their heirs are also rarely interested in the fate of works that make up the majority of library collections). However, the main right of the author is moral, it is not limited in time and assumes that the work was created for others and is valuable precisely because it preserves the name and creative contribution of the author in our memory. Wishing to protect the masters of our culture, we have erased them from the memory of society. Units won. According to Vladimir Kharitonov, executive director of the Association of Internet Publishers, no more than 200-300 writers or their heirs in Russia receive in the form of royalties for their books amounts comparable to the subsistence minimum. Perhaps, to someone from the entertainment industry, this may seem unusual (although obviously not to everyone), but any author of a scientific work understands that the meaning of its creation is not to make money on it, but to express something important, to share by this, to contribute, to convey the meaning.

An excellent illustration of the merciless absurdity of the situation was the idea of starting the countdown of the protection of works from the date of the rehabilitation of repressed authors, of whom we had an awful lot in the twentieth century. Now they are "locked" for a long time! The rights to Mandelstam will be released by the middle of the century, and before that they cannot be used on legal resources, although the poems were created precisely in order to be read - preferably aloud. It was just that at the time of the creation of existing laws, it was difficult to imagine that access to readers would not be provided by publishers, but by platforms, and the protection of works could lead to the fact that for all or most of the audience they would remain inaccessible or would be available only in violation of the law.

Since 2010, the Internet Publishers Association has been pushing for a change in government copyright policy, calling for widespread reform. In 2019, under the auspices of Skolkovo, we took part in a study that outlined concrete steps in this area. As before, we stand for the maximum expansion of access to knowledge and cultural values without infringing on the rights of authors of works and rightholders. This means that we have found a lot of simple and understandable ways to do the main thing: to ensure the availability of knowledge and cultural values at the speed of communication, which would allow us to get a huge stimulus for the development of a knowledge society and digital economy in all areas, because we increase our level of competence and understanding in everyone can do it in new conditions. All that remains is to do!

But if some of the decisions can be implemented in the legal field by the efforts of the legislator or the executive branch, then some issues still require a certain political solution. For example, the introduction of a new procedure for working with orphan or orphan works, that is, those whose author or copyright holder cannot be established with the help of reasonable and appropriate measures. Or, more importantly, the redemption of rights to works is the most important modern practice, which opens up from a new side in the current situation: as one of the key measures to stimulate the creative industry, social support of authors and their heirs - and, at the same time, a huge contribution to the development of modern digital culture. Of course, this is not so easy to organize, given that someone and somehow will have to make a decision on the deal. However, it should also be remembered that in Soviet times, to which most of the works belong, funding for the cultural industry, creativity and scientific activity was carried out not through the publishing business or the exploitation of rights, but also through incentive and reward measures, which were also country houses., and apartments, and cars, and bonuses. Although the term of copyright protection was almost three times shorter than it is now (Russia increased it "retroactively" after joining the Berne Convention, despite the initial clause that allowed it to be avoided).

By returning the masters and creators of all works to their due, we not only reward the best and show gratitude, but also return the balance of relations familiar from Soviet times. There is ground for fears, caution and criticism, but there is also a chance to restore justice, while feeding everyone with “seven loaves of bread”. However, it is important to be in time: we have been campaigning for this for ten years already, and those to whom we could say “thank you” are becoming less and less every month … This is especially obvious today, on May 9, on Victory Day. Without the usual parade, this day shows its true nature as a day of Remembrance.

Operation Last Chance

The older generation suffers the hardest from the coronavirus epidemic. But they are already mowed down by death. Not a week goes by without the next ruler of the thoughts of the past gone from life: a genius playwright, director, actor, performer or composer. Due to the epidemic, many of them missed their last chance to earn at least something from their works, but few of them can properly take care of this. Their heirs are far from always ready to deal with the rights to creative works, especially if there is no one to sell them: until recently, very few people had thought that the best way to take care of the legacy was to decide to publish everything legally in the open access with the possibility of admission by search engines and reservation. This is what the heirs of Vysotsky and Strugatsky do.

Leo Tolstoy was able, although it cost him a scandal, to transfer to the open access most of his works, and they have come down to us in their entirety. But most of what was created in the twentieth century is not republished. There are two graphs that perfectly illustrate the situation. On the one hand, a study conducted on the basis of Amazon, in which you can see the number of reprints of books, distributed by columns, depending on the year of publication. On the other hand, the data of the Book Chamber of the Russian Federation. Although the difference between them is visible to the naked eye, with the twentieth century it is bad for everyone - although “they” have the nineteenth century, the era of science and the Enlightenment. And we have had censorship for the last 200 years … and a gaping gap in access to books created in the world and in our own country in the 1920s-1980s. - in Soviet times. To all indiscriminately - both to the inept propagandistic and therefore deservedly forgotten, and to those whose works still rightfully belong to the best examples of Russian literature. But they are forgotten, too, because it is simply unprofitable for publishers to release "all kinds of junk", and librarians rarely get it all the way to scan all this, because the demand is low - and it is low, because nothing can be found! It turns out a vicious circle of unconsciousness.

The epidemic for the creators of our cultural and scientific values is a “test shot” following the legally prescribed oblivion and the technologically determined impossibility of monetization. Of course, many people think that the decision made by the Berlin authorities to support grants from urban artists is extravagant. Our conservative society sees this, perhaps, as an unfounded advance, not understanding the value of the creative community in the life of society. But here are our creators of culture and knowledge. They will all leave soon or leave before our very eyes. We look aside when, under the guise of caring for their interests, their contribution is erased from memory or sluggishly trying to trade it. Why can't we pay off everyone who created the culture and science of the twentieth century for us in order to make their works publicly available? What does it cost us to free even our own twentieth century? How much does memory cost? The epidemic and the programs to stimulate the economy set the right scale for comparison: the 20th century can be liberated, relatively speaking, by surrender.

We have been talking about this for 10 years already, but time is running out: perhaps now is the last moment when it will be fair to the creators of the works. Mechanisms can be developed, resources can be found. They will be incomparable compared to the trillions that are devoured by coal and state companies that give us exhaust as a bonus - and employment for old dangerous professions, for which demand is falling in the era of global warming. Here we could return from oblivion and save the image of the state, make the same National Electronic Library a real repository of cultural values … And help to elderly workers of science, culture, art and education - our authors - will obviously not be superfluous now. It will be perceived as a well-deserved recognition, but it will cost less than "rescuing" one troubled bank, one large project, or even free access to a small set of government websites announced in the message.

We still have Soviet organizations that once distributed benefits for creative workers. There are still those who can find the author - or the copyright holder, if we did not have time. Of course, we primarily protect the moral rights of the author when we want to open access to works, but those who make money from their works should be compensated for the fact that their works have passed into the public domain or into the open access based on the chosen type of open licenses. … The algorithm here is simple: the more rights the author transfers, the more valuable the work, the more the payment can be. You can start with a general open offer on a uniform basis and then separately resolve issues with someone who wants a different deal. Of course, in such matters it is impossible without pressure - but if information about the negotiations is open, then we can expect that a reasonable solution will be found both in general and in individual situations - and the problem will be solved. The main thing is to make sure that the redemption of rights is accompanied by the actual appearance of works in the legal open access with reservation, indexing and free distribution - so that nothing can be “lost”.

However, this is a much more understandable task, for which we have almost everything ready now - the NEB, and Noosphere with the Federal Reserve System of Knowledge Banks, and the iPChain blockchain registry, and the Internet Archive, not to mention “Wikipedia "with" Wikimedia Commons ", etc.

If it is impossible to find the author of the work, then it is necessary to implement a hybrid system with notification in the register of the search for the author of the work and using it for free in the case of non-commercial, including scientific or educational activities, or for insurance. For example, 1000 rubles - in the case of commercial use of the work (and free in the case of non-commercial use). According to the estimates of the Association of Internet Publishers, more than two-thirds of all texts are written by authors who are problematic to find or whose heirs, that is, these works are orphanous. We must free them now.

In combination with the reform of copyright, in this way we can launch a colossal program of saturation of the single electronic Russian space of knowledge - or the Noosphere, as we like it - with knowledge and cultural values, our memory, realizing that the effect of these measures will be multiplied many times over, because rights to works, we must stimulate their use: after all, this is how works of the twentieth century can manifest themselves in the mosaic postmodern reality of new media. The digital environment, the culture of new media - this is the "Remix culture", which is formed largely through the citation and use of works created earlier. It is logical to assume that the more of them will be available, the better the result will be, the richer and deeper the meanings, the stronger the memory. The main thing is to free the array of works from redundant restrictions.

One should not hesitate in this matter. If we miss the moment, we ourselves will not notice how the "confrontation" of the Internet and television will make the "break of times" final: there are even fewer common values shared by all, even a circle of common meanings and well-known quotes … Indeed, is the card index of images from old films and texts? It's hard to say for sure, but if our past melts into the haze of serials, we will hatch again into this world naked - it will be, let's say, another story.

There are many platforms, they are all different and tend not to let search robots inside, this is not a public space. All of this together will continue to program disunity. The desire to protect the author from the arbitrariness of the state, to give him rights and provide him with income, turned into an imputation to the author of the obligation to take care of the fate of his works or to face the abyss of unconsciousness. We are forced to admit that most of the authors of the twentieth century, for the most part, will not be able to cope with either one or the other. And their heirs may not be up to it. Nobody - and nothing - will be found. We have a chance to realize that in the new conditions, as in the distant "oral" society, our main common task is not to forget what we need to know. The epidemic hits the elderly, and we need to take care of preserving everything that we have practically lost, while those who remember all this and help us to make out are still alive. Therefore, this is probably our last chance.

Plan "A"

It is difficult to say whether we will be able to liberate the 20th century quickly, or whether it will take so long that it will no longer matter. It is also difficult to predict if we will succeed in how we will do this: we will legalize the use of orphan works or expand the rights of libraries, launch a campaign under a liability insurance scheme or deal with the purchase of rights - it is not known. I agree with those who say that it is extremely important not to offend the authors in the liberation process, as happened with the clumsy attempt to give “bonuses” for rehabilitation, which turned out to be a ticket to oblivion.

But there are things you can do right now. We conducted a whole study to answer the question of how you can expand the use of works and open access to them without violating the rights of the author and copyright holder. The result is a very voluminous document with a serious justification, coming from an understanding of the rights of the author and consumer of knowledge and cultural values in different countries of the world, with proposals for Russia. However, none of them can be compared with the need to introduce a fashion for legal open publication of works, to educate people, to eliminate legal illiteracy and nihilism, so to speak. And for this purpose, the idea of Vladimir Kharitonov, executive director of the Association of Internet Publishers, which he expressed during the preparation of our study, may be useful, but this idea has taken shape in crystal clear form only now. It's very simple. Here's what Vladimir offers:

Copyright is based on the fact that only the author has the right to copy and sell his works - hence the copyright, and the familiar sign of its protection ©, notifying everyone that the exclusive right to a work belongs to such and such an author, or, which happens much more often, some publisher. And if the author is interested in just the opposite? What if he only wants his works to be read, watched, listened to, to be remembered and respected? What if he only needs his moral rights to the work? Surprisingly, copyright isn't well suited for this. How can an author inform the world that with his work everyone can do whatever they want, so long as they do not forget who wrote it? The © sign will no longer work for such an author. We need another - Ⓐ, a mark for the protection of memory, a mark for the protection of authorship, notifying everyone that this work is available without restrictions, open for copying and use, but only on condition that the name of the author who created it is preserved.

On my own I can add to understand the context that the author's moral rights, unlike property rights, never expire, they are not limited in time. These include the right of attribution, that is, the authorship of a work - in accordance with the Berne Convention, it arises automatically at the time of creation. There is also a right to the integrity of the work. We at the Association of Internet Publishers have long come to the conclusion that protecting the moral rights of authors requires a special infrastructure for backing up and indexing copies (and versions) of works, and even made a special project of the Federal Reserve System of Knowledge Banks with the Noosphere.ru registry.

Of the open licenses that were included in Part 4 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation through the efforts of Dmitry Medvedev and a group of Internet educators, the most popular, for example, in scientific circles is the attribution license (symbol: CC BY),providing the widest possible rights to the user: it is it that is used by the largest repositories to facilitate access to works. The authors easily agree to this, because the task of a scientific publication is to generate resonance and discussion, which means that it is necessary to ensure the widest possible dissemination of information about the work. It may seem surprising to some, but it was the author's moral right that gave rise to the concept of "plagiarism" as the appropriation of other people's ideas, discoveries and performances. In antiquity, this was a terrible crime, because if a murderer could only take his life, then a thief of other people's creations encroached on the author's immortality - the memory of descendants, the only form available to man to overcome his time.

Basically, social media users are driven by the same motivation. The distribution of a work - for example, a custom video or a post on social networks - seems to be the desired result of its creation, especially if it is possible to preserve the authorship and mention, fulfill the conditions de jure required by this license.

However, it is very difficult to explain something about Creative Commons in Russia. It is much easier to introduce a special regime - similar to CC BY - which assumes that the author is interested in protecting exclusively moral rights - that is, the right to the integrity of the work (which, as we remember, does not exclude parody) and the preservation of authorship, that is, mention. Although copyright does not require registration and is born “automatically” at the time of creation, it is the publication of information about a work or the work itself under the name of the author, from a practical point of view, creates the basis for the author to enter into his moral rights, which are infinite. If, in the process of such a publication, the author indicates the Ⓐ icon, then only the moral rights of the author will be protected, which will facilitate the digitization and processing of the work, its use not on one, but on all platforms - subject to correct citation, of course.

For the practical implementation of this idea, changes in legislation are needed. In particular, Article 1271 "Sign of Copyright Protection" of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation should be stated as follows:

For notification of the exclusive right to a work, the copyright holder has the right to use the copyright protection mark, which is placed on each copy of the work and consists of the following elements: the letter "C" in a circle; name or title of the copyright holder; year of the first publication of the work. The author, to notify that he permits the use of the work in any way, provided that his authorship is indicated, in accordance with Art. 1286.1, may use the sign of authorship, which is placed on each copy of the work and consists of the letter "A" in a circle and the name of the author ".

However, like Creative Commons, our mark may come into circulation within the framework of existing laws - provided that it is used by the authors voluntarily on the principle of affiliation. To that end, we could probably take the latest revision of CC BY and equate the Type "A" license with it. However, here one can reasonably argue that in this case we remain hostages of confused explanations of what exactly are open licenses, which very seriously restrains our authors - those who are still alive and write in full - from their use. So I think this is Plan B. Plan "A"- to introduce a special form of designation in the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. Not because CC BY cannot be used, which is already legal, etc., but because it will be easier for people to understand and use a simple new conventional sign in order to immediately understand the essence and meaning of publicly available publication on free licenses.

I think we will be supported by authors, librarians, publishers of new electronic platforms and scientific journals, and most importantly, scientists themselves. And it seems to me impossible to argue "against", because there are people who do everything this way, and there is no reason why someone could be against the fact that they could prioritize the author's eternal and inalienable moral rights over property rights, which are few those that are limited in time are also not needed by everyone in such a situation, as is convincingly shown in the examples given above.

Therefore, we are discussing a campaign to introduce an amendment to the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which allows authors of works to choose the most open form of protection of their moral rights, and are ready for expert discussions with our colleagues and partners of what else we could do to expand the voluntary discovery of works by their authors. … Perhaps now is the right time to focus on meeting these challenges. In order not to face then again with puzzles like the one with which we started and which we should also do - gaining memory.