Orphan works in private international law

This dissertation is devoted to the consideration of a particularly actual issue of the cross-border legal regime of orphan works, i.e. the objects of copyright or related rights, the copyright owners of which cannot be identified or located despite diligent search. The author conducted a detailed analysis of normative, doctrinal and law-enforcement approaches to the "orphan work" definition and also proposed universal features for recognizing the orphan status of works. Moreover, the author studied and systematized the main normative models of the orphan works’ use: 1) collective and compulsory licensing, 2) restrictions on users’ liability and rightsholders’ legal remedies, 3) limitation of exclusive rights, as well as doctrinal proposals to legalize the use of such works, including those borrowed from other branches of law not related to intellectual property law. In addition, in the dissertation there is a consideration of the possibility of applying to orphan works the mechanism of using which is not legally enshrined in the Russian Federation, the rules of free use and of organizations for collective management of rights, as well as the bills of 2015, 2021 and 2023 regulating the procedure of using orphan works in Russia. The dissertation highlights the lack of a universal international approach not only substantive-legal, but also conflict-of-laws character to the regulation of orphan works, which negatively affects the dissemination of creative content and the extraction of material benefits from its use. The author sees the solution to the problem in the conventional approach to the legal regime of orphan works, therefore only internationally unified rules will allow, conducting one diligent search, the use of such objects of copyright or related rights in different countries in the ways necessary for the user.