Joan Borsten who does not subscribe to the listserv asked me to post the following in response to a discussion involving Copyrights on Russian films which we had back in March regarding a post by Eli Savada that a company known as Krupny Plan had copyrighted hundreds of classic and recent Russian films First of all, NIEs had to be filed by the original copyright holder, which was Mosfilm. Rigma (Joseph Berov) was an agent at that time of Krupniy Plan, the distributor of Mosfilm. Mosfilm filed its own NIEs. Rigma tried to file for all rights in all media in order to create false "facts" but was stopped by Mosfilm which complained to the US copyright office. Unfortunately at the time no one at the Copyright Office understood that Rigma was not an agent for the original copyright holder. Six months later in July 1998 , having amassed a legal collection of master cassettes and negatives for printing official Krupniy Plan boxes, Berov stopped paying Krupniy Plan and became a pirate. At the time he was on Federal Probation for importing soviet women into this country for the purpose of indentured servitude. Secondly, Mosfilm and Krupniy Plan and US marshals raided Rigma America aka St, Ptersburg publishing house AKA Russian Book and WHolesale AKA St Petersburg Publishing aka RussKniga May 1 and May 2, 2002. They reportedly found in Berov's warehouse 100,000 illegally duplicated copies of Mosfilm movies, 600,000 fake holograms, and tens of thousands of pirated European movies. Not to mention some MPAA titles -- incredible because Berov is out on $1m bail after a massive FBI raid in Dec 2000 involving piracy of the MPAA and American recording industry (he pleaded guilty in Feb 2002 and will be sentenced in September). I believe you will discover that the Mosfilm suit seeks cancellation of all of those hundreds of illegal registrations described above. It brings to a total of 3 the piracy suits which have brought against Berov/Rigma/St. Petersburg publishing house in Eastern DIstrict Federal Court. He lost one of those cases to us in AUgust 2001 (about piracy of the Russian animation we licensed in 1992). He pleaded guilty to the FBI case. And now Mosfilm. Joan Borsten Films by Jove 11325 Sunshine Terrace Studio City, CA 91604 818 5060550 fax 818 7520387 ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html