Co-Authorship of Scientific, Literary, and Artistic Works
E. P. Gavrilov · Soviet Law and Government · 1983
Co-authorship occurs when a work is the creative labor of two or more authors. Article 99 of the Principles of Civil Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics and Article 482 of the RSFSR Civil Code refer to a work of co-authors as a collective work. The law states that copyright in a collective work belongs to the authors jointly, whether or not such work constitutes one complete whole or consists of parts that are of independent significance, i.e., parts that can be used independently of one another. Given such "divided" co-authorship, each co-author retains the copyright to his part of the collective work. On the other hand, when the co-authorship is "indivisible," special copyright to parts of the work do not exist because they cannot be singled out.1