 At the time of the disintegration of the USSR, the copyright law in force was defined by chapter IV of the union-wide 1961 Fundamentals of Civil Legislation, amended in 1973, when the USSR had joined the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC).Each of the republics implemented these Fundamentals in their own local laws.In the Russian SFSR, the Russian Civil Code had been adapted to the 1961 Fundamentals in 1964, and the 1973 changes due to the accession to the UCC entered in force in Russia on March 1, 1974.