ABSTRACT
The current chapter offers a cursory overview of copyright law development under communism, focusing on the evolution of copyright legislation from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. Its purpose is twofold. First, to offer an elementary typologization of communist copyright through an analysis of some of its basic features and functions. This was deemed necessary in light of the fact that there are often implicit or explicit assumptions about the nature of communist copyright, including: the presumed uniformity of copyright law under real socialism, as well as the contention that copyright law in East Central and South East Europe was entirely predicated on the Soviet model; the supposition that copyright law after 1945 was a clear departure from what had preceded it, as well as the certainty that it represented a diversion from European developments, or again the conception of the sanctimonious character of authors’ rights under communism due to the existence of censorship mechanisms and the absence of real market competition. The second purpose is to analyse the evolution of copyright legislation in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, to outline and characterize the evolution of their respective copyright laws with a view to their particular traits as well as continuities and discontinuities. It is outside the purview of this chapter to provide a detailed analysis of copyright practice in the mentioned countries; nonetheless, and to the extent possible, the analysis strives to embed the development of copyright legislation within the sociocultural and political context of the times.
