Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Legislative changes Legislative decrees invalidated some—but not all—of the provisions of the Tsarist copyright law. In the context of the general abolition of legal and testimonial succession rights, the nationalization decree of November 26, 1918 also reduced the copyright term from the 50 years p.m.a. (—"after the author's death") of the Tsarist copyright law to the lifetime of the author. Assignments of copyrights in their entirety were invalidated by a decree of October 10, 1919. Under the Tsarist law, an author could transfer his copyrights to a publisher; under Soviet doctrine, this was not possible: an author could only grant a publisher a time-limited publication right, a principle that would hold throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the contracts to be used were standardized and a fixed schedule for royalties was defined by a decree of October 25, 1918. Copyright in itself was upheld, though: works that had not been nationalized could only be used or reproduced with the consent of the author. Nationalized works could only be published with the consent of the People's Commissariat for Education, to which a publisher also had to pay a fee according to a fixed schedule. Copyright Act of 1925 The legal situation concerning copyright in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s was confused. The Tsarist copyright law was still partially in effect, but its status was unclear. There were a number of decrees affecting copyright, but there was no unified legal treatment. The new Civil Law of the Russian SFSR, which became effective on January 1, 1923, did not contain any provisions on copyright either. In 1924, the Council of People's Commissars launched a project to develop a new copyright statute. On January 30, 1925, the Central Executive Committee passed the new Fundamentals of Copyright Law. These "Fundamentals" (—) were to serve as a model law for the laws of the individual republics of the Soviet Union, which all—with the exception of the Ukrainian SSR—passed laws implementing the Fundamentals at the republic level in 1925/26; the RSFSR Copyright Act was passed on October 11, 1926. All these republics' laws did not deviate from the Fundamentals. Only in the Azerbaijan SSR were the copyright provisions included in the Civil Code of the republic; in all other SSRs, the act was a separate ad-hoc piece of legislation. The 1925 Copyright Act provided for a general copyright