Related rights: general provisions on certain uses of copyright objects

The fight against the illegal distribution of audiovisual products in the Internet has received a quite legitimate reason in recent months. And it is based more on the civil institution "Neighboring Rights". However, not everyone understands the true meaning and content of this legal sub-sector. So you should consider it in detail.

Concept and objects of related rights

In most relevant legal studies, this institution is presented as a collection of rights that are close and related to copyright law. To understand this relationship, you need to uncover objects of related rights. To those it is customary to include the following:

• Execution of objects of copyright - regardless of what they represent: a literary or poetic work, a musical composition, etc .;
• Recording of musical or other sound works on a medium (phonograms);
• Production of television, radio and Internet broadcasting.

If we refer to the essence of each of these objects, then we can conclude that none of them falls under the category of copyright. This statement is due to the fact that, despite the presence of the element of creativity, they are not finished works created independently. So, a good example is a musical work. Music and poems can be written by the singer of the song, but the situation is quite common where the rights to these components were acquired from third parties. In the first case, copyrights and related rights coincide, and in the second case, the case of the institution of neighboring rights occurs. The same applies to the performance of literary works in the audio format.

Proceeding from the above, related rights are a special legal institution with the aim to provide legal regulation of the field of transfer of copyright objects.

Legitimate protection of related rights

Speaking about the legal protection of the institution in question, it should be clear that copyright and related rights are divided in terms of the universality of the emergence and dissemination of their protection. In the case of copyrights, one must speak of protection from the moment the work was created. And regardless of where it was created, the author has the opportunity to effectively use their rights in all countries.

Related rights are subject to a different regime of legal protection. Thus, in 1961 the international community adopted a convention in Rome, which requires all the acceding parties to provide an equal protection regime for residents of these countries. It follows that if a state is not a member of this convention, then the subject of the sub-sector in question is not entitled to protection until its status as a subject of neighboring rights is registered in the appropriate order.

In any case, the state provides the subject with three options for the protection of related rights - administrative, civil law or criminal law.

Civil-law protection allows appealing to the competent authorities with a statement, one of the requirements of which may be:

• Recognition of related rights for a strictly defined person;
• Cessation of acts that promote or provoke violation of neighboring rights.

Administrative and criminal protection can be applied in the event that significant damage was caused, the scope of which is established by the relevant legislation. In this case, it is not uncommon for the institution of the statement of claim to be used in criminal proceedings to claim lost profits and compensate for the damage.

Adjacent rights, as it became clear, are a kind of way of commercializing copyright objects. Therefore, the value of studying and developing this sub-sector of law is undeniable.