Another oddity is that we're dealing with a Scviet copyright, and those laws were (a) not in sync with Western rules and (b) not recognized by the West for many years. Soviets copied Western material freely and vice versa. Not sure how much of this has transferred over to the Russian Republic and Ukraine which (along with 13 other countries) have replaced the Soviet Union. Let's just say that the Soviet tradition of samizdat preceeded the sharing of music files via Napster by decades.

--Charlie Baum