According to the current Russian civil law, objects of copyright protection are creative works of science, art and literature. In particular, copyrightable objects are:
Generally, for full valuation of copyright valuation the following information and documents are required:
Depending on the purpose of valuation and other factors, the above list of information and documents may be reduced or expanded after our detailed review of the valuation assignment.
As the name suggests, the term “author’s rights” describes not just one right, but a combination of several different rights at once. The authors’ rights for any copyrighted work in Russia are divided into two main groups.
The first group is the moral (non-property) rights of the author in relation to his/her work. Moral rights include:
All moral rights are non-property rights because it is impossible to alienate those rights from a person (author). Therefore, author’s moral rights cannot be sold, gifted, inherited or transferred in any other way. Author’s moral rights do not participate in legal property circulation and cannot be appraised.
The second group is of the author’s rights is the group of economic rights, which are property rights of the author in relation to his/her work. The author’s rights in this group consist of the copyright - the exclusive right (see definition of the exclusive right in Russia) of the author to use copyrighted work in any legal way for a limited period of time and non-exclusive rights, which author can grant to third parties if they want to legally use his/her copyrighted work under license agreement.
Unlike moral author’s rights, economic author’s rights can be transferred to other persons/entities (sold, donated, transferred by inheritance, etc.), therefore economic author’s rights participate in market circulation and can be appraised along with property rights to other types of intellectual property. With economic author’s rights situations are possible when the author of the work of science, art or literature and the copyright holder of the same work are different entities.
According to Russian civil law, all author’s rights (both moral and economic) to any copyrightable work begin at the time of the work’s creation and are protected by the state without the any registration. Rights to certain works, such as databases and computer programs (including operating systems), can be officially registered at the request of the author, but such registration is optional. However, that voluntary registration of copyright on computer programs and databases is advisable because often helps in resolving situations with violation of the copyright, as it is a strong evidence of authorship.
Valuation of author’s rights is possible only in regard to economic rights – copyright (which is the exclusive right) and non-exclusive rights to use copyrighted work under a license agreement. Technically, copyright valuation is a special case of intellectual property valuation, in which the valuation subject is copyrighted work of science, art or literature.
An independent valuation of the fair market value of copyrighted work in Russia is most often required in the following typical situations:
Our firm has more than 20 years of experience in copyright valuation in Russia and we provide qualified professional services of independent valuation of copyright and related rights to resolve any situation.
For more information on our valuation services, please contact us.