This page provides an overview of copyright rules of Serbia relevant to uploading works into Wikimedia Commons. Note that any work originating in Serbia must be in the public domain, or available under a free license, in both Serbia and the United States before it can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. If there is any doubt about the copyright status of a work from Serbia, refer to the relevant laws for clarification.

Background

The present state of Serbia was formed when the much-reduced Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, renamed the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, broke up into Serbia and Montenegro in 2006. In 2008 Kosovo declared its independence of Serbia.

Serbia has been a member of the Berne Convention since 17 June 1930 as inherited from the former Yugoslavia, to which the declaration of continuation made on 19 September 2006, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty since 13 June 2003.^[1]

As of 2024 the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), an agency of the United Nations, listed the Law on Copyright and Related Rights (Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia No. 104/2009, 99/2011, 119/2012, 29/2016 (CC) and 66/2019) as the main IP law enacted by the legislature of Serbia.^[1] WIPO holds the text of this law in their WIPO Lex database.^[2] The government of Serbia holds Serbian and English texts of the 2009 law on their website.^[3][4]

• A work of known authorship and the author died before January 1, 1954
• An anonymous work published before January 1, 1954
• A photograph or a work of applied art published before January 1, 1973

According to the 2009 Copyright Law of Serbia,

• Pecuniary rights last for the life of an author and 70 years after his/her death.^{[104/2009 Art.102(1)]}
  • Moral rights of an author last even after the expiration of his/her pecuniary rights.^{[104/2009 Art.102(2)]}
  • If an author has created a work as an employee in the performance of his/her duties, the employer ... holds exclusive pecuniary rights on its exploitation ... for 5 years from completion of that work.^{[104/2009 Art.98(1)]} The author then acquires the exclusive pecuniary rights.^{[104/2009 Art.98(3)]}

• • Co-authors’ pecuniary rights expire 70 years from the death of the author that was the last to die.^{[104/2009 Art.103(1)]}
• Pecuniary rights for an anonymous or pseudonymous work expire 70 years from the date of its disclosure if the author's identity is not revealed during this term.^{[104/2009 Art.103(2)]}
• Copyright on collective works lasts for 70 years from the date of the legal publication of the work.^{[104/2009 Art.103(3)]}
• The term of protection of a film expires 70 years from the death of director, scriptwriter, dialogue author or the author of the music specifically composed for the film, whoever dies last.^{[104/2009 Art.104(2)]}

See also: Commons:Unprotected works According to the 2009 Copyright Law of Serbia,

• The protection of copyright shall not apply to general ideas, procedures and methods of operations or mathematical concepts as such, as well as concepts, principles and instructions included in a work of authorship.^{[104/2009 Art.6(1)]}
• The following shall not be deemed works of authorship: 1) Laws, decrees and other regulations; 2) Official materials of state bodies and bodies performing public functions; 3) Official translations of regulations and official materials of state bodies and bodies performing public functions; 4) Submissions and other documents presented in the administrative or court proceedings.^{[104/2009 Art.6(2)]}

Copyright tags

See also: Commons:Freedom of panorama OK {{FoP-Serbia}}, if the work is displayed in an open public space. Under the 2009 copyright law,

• Any work that is permanently displayed in a street, a square or some other open public place may be reproduced in two dimensions and its copies thus made may be distributed, as well as communicated to the public in some other way, without the author's permission and without paying remuneration.^{[104/2009 Art.51]}

The panorama exception is bound to the common provision (Article 41) reiterating the Berne three-step test:

See also: Commons:Currency OK {{PD-SerbiaGov}}

Threshold of originality

OK for text-only logos,  Unsure for everything else, assume OK.

There is very little publicly available case law in Serbia on the threshold of originality. Part of the reason is that in the vast majority of cases if the originality of a work isn't obvious, courts declare themselves incompetent to decide the matter and defer to expert witnesses. For example, in a 2021 case before the Belgrade Appellate court, the court did not rule that the logo visible here in the top left corner was obviously unoriginal or original, but rather as the burden of proof was on the plaintiff to prove their work's originality, and they did not provide any expert testimony as evidence to support that, they lost the case, but presumably without prejudice to a future case.^[5] Milić, Dimitrije (2005), Komentar zakona o autorskom i srodnim pravima: sa sudskom praksom i međunarodnim konvencijama i ugovorima, Belgrade: NNK Internacional, ISBN 978-86-83635-40-5 mentions a 2001 decision by the Supreme Court of Serbia which declared a logo consisting purely of text to be below the threshold of originality under the 1978 copyright law,^[6] however a freedom of information request has not been able to locate more information on the case. As Serbia is a civil law country, the threshold of originality can nonetheless be assumed to be relatively high, as, according to the Supreme Court of Cassation, "А copyrighted work is not original if it is the result of emulation or imitation of already existing works, without the specific and individual intellectual imprint of the author that distinguishes it from other works.".^[7]

See also

Caution: The above description may be inaccurate, incomplete and/or out of date, so must be treated with caution. Before you upload a file to Wikimedia Commons you should ensure it may be used freely. See also: Commons:General disclaimer