Happy new year to all readers of this blog. I will do my best to inform you of the latest trends and legal changes in the Bulgarian legislation. As a lawyer, I will try to give you best advice for your particular case.

As from 1 July 2008 the Bulgarian State Gazette is uploaded online. Before that date it could be found only on a hard copy and with subscription. Finally we can read Bulgarian laws without paying for it and more environment friendly.

In the official website you can find the full content of the State Gazette starting from issue 30 (19 March 2008)  till now.

The Commercial Register offers a service called “online submission of applications and documents”. The feature of their website is available from the very beginning, but was not working properly for a couple of months. Fortunately, now we can use it to submit all kind of company documentation including:

• documents for (re-) registration of a company
• documents for changes in a company
• annual financial statements
• winding-up and liquidation etc.

In order to use the online feature, you need a digital signature (DS) issued to you by an official certified DS provider in Bulgaria. The price is usually around EUR 50. The Digital Document and Digital Signature Act stipulates that the state authorities of Bulgaria have to accept DSs issued only by a certified Bulgarian DS authority.
Using the DS with the Commercial Register is fairly easy: you must fill out a web form, attach scanned copies of the necessary documents (regarding the registration or to the changes you want to make in your company) and then the Java applet takes care of the digital undersigning of the application and the attachments.

Unfortunately, the feature “online payment of state fees” is not working, so you have to do it the old-fashioned way: through a bank deposit and then scan the receipt and attach it to the online form.

If you are a freelancer (writer, programmer etc.) Bulgaria is an attractive place to do your job. Pursuant to the Employment Encouragement Act, being a “freelancer” means that you both:

1. don’t work for an employer and
   
2. you are working in your capacity of a person (not through your company).

Then what type of agreement you are obliged to have signed? Easy, the type of agreement which is required you to have signed is the assignment agreement. The Bulgarian legislation sets a distinction between the employment contract and the assignment agreement. Sure, both of them entitles you to receive certain amount of money for the work, but if you have an employment contract : (inexhaustible)

• the employer is obliged to register the contract within the National Social Security Institute
• the employer is obliged to pay part of your social security installments
• there are certain restrictions and conditions in case of firing an employee
• there is a mandatory annual full-pay leave etc.

In summary, the Labour Code sets a whole different set of contract conditions in the employer-employee relations. The freelancer is freed of this restrictions, but the work is regulated by the common civil legislation: The Obligations and Agreements Act.

Sufficient funds: Pursuant to the Regulations for the appliance of the Foreigners in the Republic of Bulgaria Act, a foreigner to be able to stay in Bulgaria if he/she possesses the minimum required 50 Euro per day of stay. This means that if you are a freelancer, you should prove that you have (or will have) at least 1,500 Euro per month.

Although Bulgaria is already an EU member state,  you can still find here fairly low-wage and yet well educated employees. Many western companies outsource their software routines to Bulgaria: development of stand alone application, web applications (php, .NET , java, ajax etc.), ERP. Usually the software companies choose to establish a separate business in Bulgaria. This means that the subsidiary company will be independent in its relations to any business partner, but yet subordinate via its capital owner – the mother company.

But not only big software companies make investment in Bulgaria. Outsourcing of software development involves freelancers too. Usually only a project manager is needed whose duty will be the distribution of the work among the freelance developers.

Because of the complicated employment/assignment relations, it is highly recommended that the outsourcing company consider registering a local company which will take care of the administrative work, regarding the development of the project, including taxes management, social security, office premises, business relations etc.

The Bulgarian Parliament is now hearing a draft  law which stipulates that the Bulgarian State Gazette shall be published on the Internet. For the time being,  the State Gazette is published only on a hard copy which costs 0,80 Lev (approx. 0,40 EUR) per copy. The above fact is in collision with a principle stipulated in the Bulgarian Constitution: each Bulgarian citizen has the right to access state information in case not explicitly marked as classified.

Presently there are few companies which take advantage of the fact that State Gazette is not published online. They offer software applications which provide digitized copy of  all Bulgarian laws and thus making profit from information that should be public domain.

In case the draft law becomes law, each Bulgarian citizen will have free online access to the Bulgarian legislative database.

Regarding my previous post, now I want to outline some details about obtaining evidence for copyright of website content licensed under Creative Commons.

There are certain difficulties when applying the method mentioned in my previous post, because of the nature of the Creative Commons license. A CC-ed content may have more than one author either initially or later on, when the content is distributed via the Internet. If the original author(s) have put the content under by-nc-nd clause or under by-nd clause of the Creative Commons, no derivative content is allowed and therefore the author(s) may take advantage of my explanations in the later post here in the Legal Blog.

If the original author(s) allow their content to be used as a base for derivative works, the situation is slightly different. I’ll give you an example to illustrate my thoughts :

Let’s presume that John Smith has published a website and he put the logo of by-nc-sa clause of the Creative Commons. This means that John Smith allows everybody to distribute his webpage content, to remix it (to make derivative works), to share it, but the user (remixer, distributer) is also obliged to fulfill two mandatory conditions:

1. Not to use the content and the derivative works for a commercial purpose, and
2. To indicate John Smith as the author of the used (distributed, shared etc.) content

Difficulties arise when there are two and more authors, who have remixed the original content. In this situation, my opinion is that one of the authors-remixers could apply the TimeStamp-ing method. In order to establish the Creative Commons nature of the content, he could state at the end of the content that it is licensed under CC and point out the sources of the original content. This will prove that as of that date of TimeStamp-ing the content it was licensed under Creative Commons and the sources of the original content will be indicated.

Disclaimer: The resolution of a copyright dispute depend on a great scale on the particular judge who hears the lawsuit. As the court in Bulgaria is independent, the above arguments may or may not be considered as enough evidence to rule in favour of the party who TimeStamp-ed the content.

No-one is ultimately protected from website content theft. Every kid with knowledge in HTML and PHP would succeed in stealing your web-site’s articles. Of course, if you have put the (c) sign, there is copyright over the content. But the difficulties come when you undertake legal actions to protect this copyrighted content. Here in Bulgaria, the litigation proceedings are not so clear. I mean that the court will take into consideration each document evidencing who is the author of the content. While this is fairly easy with web software applications, the theft of website content is not so easy to prove. Software applications are not so dynamic and one can register a patent over them. The latter registration will give the author a certificate which, subsequently can be used in court as an evidence for copyright.

On the other hand, websites are large pieces of text code and text content.It is difficult to register a patent over the site’s structure and code, as they are so dynamic that they will differ the next week after obtaining the patent certificate.

A good practice is to take advantage of a service called “digital certification of date and time”. In Bulgaria each company which is duly licensed by Communications Regulation Commission (”the Provider”) to issue digital signatures (digital private and public key) offers the so called “digital certification of date and time”.

So if you want to secure your work and copyright over a website content, you can use this method. It is simple and gives you opportunity to prove your copyright over a whole website.

All you need to do consists of four simple steps:

1. You must acquire a “digital signature” from the Provider
2. Archive your whole website (eg. zip, rar, tar.gz or something else)
3. Apply your digital signature to the archive file
4. Use the TimeStamp service of the Provider (certification of time and date) over the digitally signed archive

If you follow the steps above you will have evidence to present before court. It will prove the following:

• As of the date of TimeStamp-ing the content, you have had the possession over that archive, and its contents.
• You have the copyright over the content because it has the (c) sign and your name (or company name) included as well as your digital signature applied.

Having this evidence on your side, your chances to win a copyright lawsuit in Bulgaria increase. Of course it depends on the lawyer you choose too. The more technical knowledge he has, the more your chances to win the case grow.