In one social-media discussion, a thread flashed by about “music on bones” — makeshift records cut onto discarded X-ray films in the USSR. It’s a familiar story: jazz and rock ’n’ roll, secretly recorded onto medical films showing pelvic bones and lungs, sold hand-to-hand for a ruble. Books have been written and documentaries made about the romance of the underground.
But one detail in that thread catches a lawyer’s eye, not a music lover’s: people were imprisoned for this not “for piracy,” not for copyright infringement. They were jailed for “engaging in a prohibited trade” — an article about illegal hunting, fishing, and such things. Music did not appear in the charge at all. The question is: whose rights, exactly, were Soviet X-ray-record makers violating if no rights to sound recordings existed in the USSR? The answer turned out to be more interesting than the legend of underground jazz itself.
The first recordings on X-ray film appeared in Leningrad around 1946 — according to the most widespread version, the Zvukozapis artel studio had a captured Telefunken recording machine. The logistics were brilliantly cynical: mandatory tuberculosis screenings with chest X-rays gave clinics mountains of images that could be written off after 3 years, and nurses sold them to the craftsmen for pennies. Then came the usual work: jazz, romances, and foxtrots cut with a mechanical stylus — 78 rpm, a few minutes of sound, five to ten listens before the grooves died.
A record made from someone else’s lungs is an image everyone has grown used to. Far less familiar is this fact: legally, the object was invisible. Soviet copyright protected the author of a work — the song as lyrics and music. But a phonogram, meaning the recording of a performance itself, was not a legal object in the USSR. Neither the record’s maker, nor the performer, nor the studio owner had any rights to the recording — because such rights simply did not exist in the law. X-ray-record publishers infringed someone else’s copyright in much the same way as someone humming a song to themselves: the object of infringement had never been defined.
The fate of the medium itself says it all: by the early 1960s, reel-to-reel tape recorders had finished off the ribs — tape could be copied thousands of times, while an X-ray image was single-use by definition.
So, if there was no copyright in recordings, what were people tried for? Monopoly. In 1958, a year after the Moscow Festival of Youth and Students — the very one that brought an unprecedented volume of world music into the city — the authorities banned private record-cutting; before long, magnetic recordings were squeezed out by the same logic. The Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR entered the picture with Article 162 — “Engaging in a Prohibited Trade”: punishment for repeatedly engaging in a trade “subject to a special prohibition” — up to a year of corrective labor or a fine of up to two hundred rubles, and “on a significant scale” — up to 4 years with confiscation. The text of the article is worth reading twice: it contains not a word about music, authors, or rights. There is a trade — that is, economic activity outside state authorization. This was a criminal article not about culture, but about state control of the market.
The mechanism was bureaucratically merciful in its own way: first an administrative penalty, and only then, if you were caught again, a criminal case. The state did not claim that you had stolen someone else’s property. It claimed that you were trading without a license. The most telling detail of the formula: under this approach, the recording medium — X-ray film, wax, magnetic tape — had no legal significance. The punishment was the same: you had made a run of records that was not supposed to exist.
Magnitizdat — the next generation of the same phenomenon — was punished under the same Article 162, regardless of whether a tape had been copied for sale or for personal use. Recording without state permission meant one thing in the eyes of the law: a prohibited trade. The words “intellectual property” were never heard in the indictments.
What is most revealing here is the mirror image. Melodiya only began releasing licensed Beatles, Boney M., and Bee Gees EPs in 1974–1975; before that, the company had spent decades issuing foreign music without any permissions from rights holders. Historians of Soviet recording say outright that a number of compilations from this period “should be classified as pirated editions from the standpoint of international copyright law” — their sleeves bore neither the names of rights holders nor BIEM, the compulsory mechanical-rights marking on Western records. Performers were anonymized: a beat ballad by the British group UFO was released by Vesyolye Rebyata as “Mona Lisa,” credited to the mysterious “D. Bove.”
It produced the kind of figure that would have its own paragraph in any criminal code: the state itself pirates globally, while the same state punishes a private individual for piracy locally — only under a different article and in different language. Speaking of copyright infringement in this legal order was impossible in principle: there was nothing to infringe if the rights did not exist. A good illustration is the Rome Convention of 1961, the first international instrument to protect performers and phonogram producers: the USSR was not a party to it, and Russia joined only in 2003. Until 1973, the USSR had no copyright agreement in force with the West at all — only bilateral treaties with Hungary (1967) and Bulgaria (1971) within the socialist bloc.
The category of “related rights” — the rights of performers, phonogram producers, and broadcasting organizations — appeared in the Soviet legal system only in the Fundamentals of Civil Legislation of 1991. From there it migrated into Russia’s 1993 Law on Copyright and Related Rights, where the phonogram finally became an independently protected object. In other words, nearly half a century passed in this country between the first record on an X-ray image and the first rights of a phonogram producer.
It is hard even to find a Western analogy. In the United States or France, recording someone else’s album is an encroachment on a private monopoly: there is a rights holder with damages and a lawsuit. In the USSR, recording someone else’s album was an encroachment on something an American lawyer would not even have been able to formulate — the state’s prerogative over the very existence of a record run. That is why the punishment came through the criminal code, under an article on prohibited trade, bypassing the civil claim of “compensate the damages.” The reckoning was framed in another genre: “don’t do that business.”
Stephen Coates, the London musician who assembled the largest collection of ribs and made a museum career out of it, put it precisely: these people were punks. Dissidents fight the system out of conviction; these people simply did not want to be told what to listen to. The craftsmen themselves, he candidly admitted, probably attached no importance to the exotic material: had an ordinary blank disc been at hand, they would have recorded onto that. The X-ray image was simply accessible scrap.
What makes you reconsider the whole story of “music on bones” is the picture of the legal field as a whole. Thousands of copies of other people’s jazz infringed not a single right. You were not allowed to do it. The first fact concerns the absence of law, the second its excess, and they describe the same space from two different points. At best, Soviet copyright law overlooked it: it was calibrated for another task, like a fixed-focus lens that permanently blurred every subject beyond its prescribed depth of field.
The American contrast is telling here: even in the United States, sound recordings were not protected by federal copyright until 1972 — the “gap” was filled by individual state laws and case law, then closed at the federal level. Intermediate states between “the object exists in law” and “the object does not exist in law” are a constant theme of modern history: technology almost always gets there before the law. The X-ray record is simply the most dramatic variant: a medium that lived ~15 years of active life, every last one of them legally invisible.
One thing remains. When you listen today to the digitized rasp of a recording from a piece of film, where the ribs of a person long dead show through the rock ’n’ roll, it is impossible to separate the aesthetics from the biography of the medium. A lawyer would say: this is something belonging to a legal void. A music lover would say: this is a recording that should never have existed. Both reactions are true, and they do not conflict.