According to RBC, the National Federation of the Music Industry (NFMI), which unites, according to its own data, almost 50% of the Russian music market, has asked the Ministry of Culture to review the proposed deduction rates for the use of so-called orphan works - that is, music, photographs or books whose author or copyright holder is either unknown or not in touch.
In January 2025, the Ministry of Culture proposed a draft government decree approving the rules for calculating and remuneration rates for the use of "orphan" works. According to the document, different payment arrangements are also offered for different forms of use of such works. For example, the amount of remuneration for the sale of individual copies will be determined by a fixed one-time payment. Its size will be calculated by the Russian CMO, but it should not be less than 2 thousand rubles for each work used multiplied by the total number of copies, plus additional percentage deductions from the selling price. For literary works, for example, it will be 8%, for music — 9%, for photographs — 10%.
Questions from representatives of the music industry were raised by the draft clause, which determines the amount of remuneration for "bringing works to the public." Most often, this is publishing on the Internet or on a streaming service, which is one of the most common ways to monetize songs. If it is possible to determine the actual number of users who have listened to a particular music, the Ministry of Culture suggests introducing a dynamic payment scale. For the first 300,000 auditions, this payment will be 40 kopecks at a time, for subsequent auditions in excess of this limit up to 1.5 million — 29 kopecks, for 1.5–3 million auditions — 10 kopecks and further in the direction of reducing the rate up to 4 kopecks.
The remuneration rates presented differ significantly and sometimes several times "for the worse" from the market prices for music distribution on the Internet, the NFMI said in a letter to the Ministry of Culture. This, according to the NFMI, may lead to a violation of the rights and legitimate interests of the copyright holders of works initially recognized as "orphaned", as well as the heirs of the authors and performers. Moreover, the remuneration rates themselves, as noted in the letter, remain a trade secret of the copyright holders.
In addition, low rates raise concerns that users and collective copyright management organizations will not have a motive to fully search for authors of works, the NFMI warns.
As an alternative, the NFMI suggests keeping the 40 kopeck rate for the initial 300,000 auditions. But for everything that exceeds this figure, NFMI suggests to introduce payments of 20-30 kopecks for listening.
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