Article 1259. Objects of Copyright

Paragraph 5

Copyright shall not apply to ideas, concepts, principles, methods, processes, systems, means, solutions of technical, organizational and other problems, discoveries, facts, programming languages.

Paragraph 6

Shall not be objects of copyright:

• official documents of state government agencies and local government agencies of municipal formations, including laws, other legal texts, judicial decisions, other materials of legislative, administrative and judicial character, official documents of international organizations, as well as their official translations;
• state symbols and signs (flags, emblems, orders, banknotes, and the like), as well as symbols and signs of municipal formations;
• works of folk art (folklore), which don't have specific authors;
• news reports on events and facts, which have a purely informational character (daily news reports, television programs, transportation schedules, and the like).

Full text of the Code: in Russian (in English).

Comment – According to interstate and international compacts, the Russian Federation is the legal successor of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; therefore, this license tag is also applicable to official symbols and formal documents of the Russian SFSR and the USSR (union level^[1]).

Warning – This Russian official document, state symbol or sign (postage stamps, coins and banknotes mainly) may incorporate one or more works that can be copyrightable if separated from this document, symbol or sign. In such a case, this work is not an object of copyright if reused in its entirety but, at the same time, extracting specific portions from this work could constitute copyright infringement. For example, the denomination and country name must be preserved on postage stamps.

Warning – This license tag cannot be applied to proposed official symbols and drafts of formal documents, which can be copyrighted.