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Comment by dalek2point3 | Hacker News Reader

any idea what the soviet copyright policy is on these images? in the US NASA images are always in the public domain ...

No idea, but assuming it belongs to Russia, I'm sure they're okay with pictures that make the Soviet space program look good being shared.

My understanding is that copyright is null if it relates to a state that doesn't exist anymore. I think it's almost always safe to assume that Soviet-produced images are public domain.

Looks like that instead of defaulting on copyrights, the transitional period was able to enforce retroactive copyrighting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Uni...

Fascinating subject, though!

I don't think that makes sense; in most other aspects, there's the concept of a successor state. Russia took hold of international assets, commitments and liabilities of Soviet Union. This included things like membership in the UN Security Council, commitments to SALT, or NNPT (with the related commitments to respecting Ukrainian sovereignty now quite clearly breached), the place in the Ice Hockey World Cup A Series, ownership of embassy properties all over the world, and whatever you can imagine.

I don't see why copyright to Venus pictures would be much different, if any copyright was reserved in the first place.

I think this ( the place in the Ice Hockey World Cup A Series) went to the unified team first?

I think you refer to the Olympics where there was the Unified Team (under Olympic flag). I think the Commonwealth of Independent States played friendlies only.

But I used wrong name for tournament: what I meant was the World Championships (played every year), not the World Cup (a rare event, now planned for 2016). There Russia was a successor to USSR after 1991.

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