In recent years, Russia's film industry achieved record levels of growth. In this regard, the Ministry of Culture decided to improve the film industry legislation and initiated several amendments to the legal normative acts. According to the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, these amendments will help the industry to develop more efficiently, resolve issues of intellectual property rights, simplify some bureaucratic procedures.
Counter-piracy
"Anti-piracy legislation, initiated by the Ministry of Culture a few years ago, is operational now. Certain successes have been achieved. However, in our opinion, the presence of a huge amount of illegal content on the Internet continues to cause huge direct losses to the industry. According to various estimates, the cumulative damage to the Russian film industry from piracy ranges from 40 to 70 billion rubles a year. In February, the Ministry of Culture submitted to the government a draft amendment to the Federal Law on Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection, with the help of which we want to solve three main problems.
First, it is essential to shorten time limits for issuing court decisions on violators. Second, give the opportunity to the copyright holder, that is, the film company, to address the provider or the owner of the hosting directly with the requirement to remove illegal content. Third, reduce the number of anonymous websites, introduce data requirements list which should be provided by the website owner. Although we have eliminated the biggest offenders, nevertheless, there is a huge number of websites with unauthorized content. Largely due to the fact that the law does not impose the corresponding responsibility on search engines, and search engines refuse to take any technical measures to block links to illegal websites. I hope that the Ministry of Culture's initiatives in this direction will find support from both the industry and our colleagues in the government," Medinsky said.
Film commissions
"This is an effective tool for supporting filmmakers. Film commissions were also initiated by us several years ago, they were created in the regions, and today it is a successful link between regional authorities and film companies - a kind of unified service desks," the culture minister said.
National film mode
"For today, the criterion for determining which film can be considered national is quite tough and includes many redundant restrictions. Filmmakers told us about the need to liberalize the rules when determining the category of national film (which gives substantial benefits, including in taxes) and give priority not to the financial component, but to the creative one. The Ministry proposes to submit this issue for discussion, to work it out in detail, accordingly, we will propose to amend the legislation in the corresponding way. Basically, if a film is shot in Russia by Russian directors and with Russian actors, and more than 50% of the funding is provided by, for example, China, then whose film is it? In our opinion, this is our film. And by today's rules - it's a Chinese film. This is wrong," Medinsky believes.
Legal deposit copy copy
"After the management of the State Film Fund was changed at the end of January, we have started to accept preprint materials in digital format. In the near future, we plan to introduce a bill that will ease the task of storing legal deposit copies. In addition, the Ministry of Culture will determine by its order how to hand over films to the State Film Fund and how to store them, as film tapes or as digital video files. We propose a whole series of amendments to legislative and normal acts to significantly reduce the cost and simplify both filmmakers' work and their interaction with the State Film Fund," the minister said.
