Pay for air

The Moscow Arbitration Court issued a decision dealing a blow to the indestructible film director Nikita Mikhalkov. As a result of the satisfaction of the claim of the Russian Society for Related Rights (ROSP), headed by Mikhalkov, the Russian Union of Rights Holders (RSU) may lose accreditation, and thus the fighter for morality favored by the authorities will be deprived of the opportunity to collect tax on various equipment, including cell phones, blank disks, flash drives and some “cards and tags with special marks applied, the action of which is based on proximity.” The plaintiff, as Vedomosti reminds, argued that the competition that granted accreditation to the Mikhalkov Union was held by Rosokhrankultura before the government adopted a resolution on the procedure for collecting royalties from importers, and therefore its results are invalid. The winner of the competition, however, was announced after the resolution was issued, but the court was not misled by this.

The accreditation cannot yet be terminated: the defendant has already expressed his intention to file an appeal, and now the decision of the Arbitration Court must go through the appellate authority. But if the Mikhalkovsky RSP loses its accreditation, it will have to wait at least 95 days until the next competition, according to the regulations approved by the government.

Mikhalkov, of course, cares not only about the welfare of some other artists, whose work evil consumers can copy onto a disk (in this case, it doesn’t matter whether they are then going to sell this disk to someone or just consume it at home) . Copyright holders should receive only 15% of the profits that RSP expects. 25%, as planned, will go to maintaining the organization’s apparatus, and 60% to a fund specially created by the union. Now the whole question is how the appeal commission will behave.