Back in 1970, when the Authors, Composers, and Artists Protection Act (Iran’s main copyright law, still in force today) was passed, the legislature chose criminal litigation as the primary response to rights infringement. It was the government at the time—the Pahlavi monarchy—that was eager to update the country’s laws according to pioneering international trends, rather than responding directly to requests from the act’s beneficiaries, namely the artists.
Considering that Iranian laws have always (and still do) reflect Imami [Islamic Shia] jurisprudence, and because damages claims arising from infringements on 'intangible' property rather than physical assets had no prior precedent in Islamic law, the legislature avoided creating a new category of damages. Instead, it chose to criminalize rights infringements. Another possible reason for explicitly focusing on criminal litigation while leaving civil proceedings unaddressed in the act was the desire to firmly establish and support these brand-new rights, helping them gain recognition and respect in society at the time.
Whichever the reason, the Islamic Revolution led by the Ayatollahs took place less than a decade after the statute was enacted, and the entire concept of protecting artists through a set of previously unknown intangible property rights over their creations was completely forgotten—losing both its context and justification.
For more than two decades after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1970 Artists Protection Act was almost absent from judicial practice. It wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s that conversations about artists’ rights and the need to protect them began to gradually emerge among both the public and artists themselves. Around 2004, the University of Tehran introduced the academic field of “Intellectual Property” as a master’s degree program, with the Artists Protection Act of 1970 still serving as the main copyright statute in the country.
