Composers protest against new copyright law

The Belarusian composers and poets have begun collecting signatures under an appeal to lawmakers. In their opinion, the draft legislation on copyrights that is expected to be passed by the House of Representatives, does not take into account the interests of the authors. This circumstance forced creative people to appeal to MPs, says composer Andrei Kostyugov.

Andrei Kostyugov: “The authors wrote a letter that has been endorsed and aims to make lawmakers hear us out. Such things like passing a new law should be done without taking into account the opinion of authors”.

The initiative was launched by the National Intellectual Property Center. This is the monopoly that collects money from radio stations and TV for rotating the songs by Belarusian authors.

Alexai Bichurin from the center explained Euroradio what made them step on the path war with the lawmaker and that MPs did not take into account their proposals in the legislation. He said: "All our proposals were rejected, although we had agreed on them with 15 interested ministries and institutions and introduced them to the government. But when the legislation was tabled in the parliament, our proposals were crossed out".

The center had two major proposals. Firstly, they wanted the new law to allow them to collect roalties even for the authors who did not write agreements on such services. The center describes it as "an extended license procedure".

The second proposal dealt with leaving the center as a monopoly fior collecting royalties. But lawmakers want to increase the number of such "collectors". Alexei Bichurin reckons that only a monopoly can really protect the financial rights of authors.

But in the view of Mikalai Kazak, a deputy chairman of the Education, Culture and Science Committee at the House of Representatives, if there are several organizations to collect royalties, authors will only benefit from that.

Currently, a composer has to sign an agreement with the intellectual property center in order to get money for rotating his songs. Aend even if the center wishes to collect money even for those authors who have no agreement with the center, lawmakers want to preserve the previous system.

The new copyright legislation will be discussed during the fall session, because there are money defficiencies in the draft, according to Mikalai Kazak.