Did the Soviet Union have Intellectual property laws? If yes, how did it differ from Capitalist countries?

by Shashank1000
MaesterBarth

Yes. The early Soviet Union adopted laws protecting private property due to its desire to attract foreign investment. International protection of property rights were seen as a foreign policy issue and subordinate to foreign policy.

The first such decree on intellectual property was made in 1917 and monopolized all patents and copyrights as property of the state, except for a limited six month right reserved to the authors. Between 1917 and 1931, there were frequent almost yearly changes granting rights between 15 years to the author or a five year monopoly to the State. The most consistent principal during this period was generally an acceptance of the Bern Convention of 1886. After the transition period, Soviet copyright law became generally unremarkable and closely mirrored that of civil law regimes in Europe.

During the 1970's, the Soviet Union became a state party to three treaties: the Berne Convention on the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works as amended in 1971; the Universal Copyright Convention ("UCC") as amended in 1971, and the 1971 Convention on Protection of the Interests of Producers of Phonograms Against the Illegal Reproduction of their Phonograms. On February 21, 1973, the USSR enacted a series of amendments to its own law to bring it into line with the UCC.

However, despite this regime, intellectual property cases were very rare due to the realities of a state controlled publishing industry. Oftentimes, the Soviet government would be both the official copyright holder and the infringing party, rendering much of the copyright law functionally relevant to foreign works but not to domestic authors who assigned their rights to the State to get published.

Source: Boris N. Mamlyuk, Russia & Legal Harmonization: An Historical Inquiry into Ip Reform As Global Convergence and Resistance, 10 Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev. 535 (2011)

tl;dr Basically, Soviet copyright laws were pretty vanilla and mostly similar to the west after the early revolution, making for a hum drum comparative analysis. The main difference arose from the realities of state control of media and publishing, which made copyright cases exceedingly rare and mostly a moot issue.