The Complications of Copyright Law

Before starting this digitization project, Lou Malcomb, the Director of Government Information and Geo-Science Libraries, had me look through some information about Russian copyright law.  My colleague had been in touch with others in the library field about this same subject and the responses proved to be mixed.  A librarian working in Russia said that this would be no problem to digitize, while others disagreed.  One response included a lengthy explanation of Russia copyright law, only to conclude that the information given was not conclusive.  This prompted me to do some searching of my own, which yielded an article released earlier this March.  Christopher Boffey's "Avtorskoye Pravo [Author's Law]: the Reform of Russian Copyright Law Toward an International Standard" appeared in the Maryland Journal of International Law (there will be more about this article in my next post).  Currently, any official documents, such as "laws, court judgments, and other governmental texts" is excluded from copyright laws.  Because these maps are documents from the Red Army, a government domain, then according to the law, they are not under any sort of copyright law.

What I find interesting about this situation is how complicated the world of copyright can be.  Understanding United States copyright laws can be difficult enough, but then trying to understand another country's set of laws adds yet another layer of complexity.  It seems to me that there should be a simpler way to keep track of what falls under copyright and what does not for each country.  What I find more troubling is that even the information specialists don't seem to have a diffinitive answer either.  My colleague forwarded the responses to her question that she had posted on a list-serve.  The responses were either completing inconclusive or contradictory.  However, I must also keep in mind that things are constantly changing in former Communist countries, and that it is more than likely that even information specialists working in Russia are just as unsure about their laws as we sometimes are of our own.