What is the Russian Authors' Society and why was its head just arrested? We explain in pirate GIFs.

Sergei Fedotov, the general director of the Russian Authors' Society (RAO), was arrested in Moscow earlier this week on charges of fraud. Meduza explains what the RAO is, why nobody likes it, and why exactly Fedotov now finds himself behind bars. And, just to keep things interesting, we'll do it with GIFs. GIFs with pirates.

1. The Russian Authors' Society emerged in its present form in 1993. It collects money for the use of various songs, which the organization is then supposed to transfer as honoraria to the people who wrote those songs (or to the artists' relatives). In 2014, RAO collected 4.6 billion rubles ($72 million), 3.1 billion rubles ($48 million) of which actually reached the artists. (The rest went to taxes and the organization's operating costs.)

1. Copyright societies exist all over the world, but RAO is a special beast. It works so zealously to raise money for the use of musical compositions that it's found itself at the center of public sandals more than once. In 2008, for example, RAO sued the organizer of a Deep Purple concert for using the band's own music without prior approval from the RAO. The organization has also tried to get money from soccer officials because stadiums play “The Football March,” written by Soviet composer Matvey Blanter in 1938. RAO has also gone after an individual soccer team for playing a song by the Russian rock band Splean. Alexander Vasilyev, the band's frontman, was even forced to file official paperwork granting the soccer stadium the right to play his group's songs.

1. The Russian Authors' Society isn't the country's only organization that collects money and transfers it to copyright holders. For instance, there's also the Russian Union of Copyright Holders (RSP) and the All-Russian Organization of Intellectual Property (VOIS). In 2015, these groups decided to join a single trade union, inasmuch as they were already led by the same people: RAO's general director, Sergei Fedotov, had the same role in RSP, and his deputy director at RSP, Andrei Krichevsky, headed VOIS. The film director Nikita Mikhalkov, meanwhile, who is one of RSP's founders, serves on the board of directors for the new trade union.

1. In April 2016, several Russian artists refused to continue working with RAO. Musicians like Basta, Stas Namin, Nyusha, Konstantin Meladze, Vyacheslav Butusov, and others argued that RAO pays them too little.

1. In late June, police in Moscow arrested RAO General Director Sergei Fedotov, charging him with using the organization's resources to buy four buildings in Moscow, which he later sold, without any money ever returning to the Russian Authors' Society. Investigators say the damages amount to half a billion rubles ($7.8 million).

1. Nikita Mikhalkov, Fedotov's longtime friend and one of the founders of the Russian Union of Copyright Holders, has called the arrest excessive. “I'm not a lawyer, an investigator, a prosecutor, or a judge. I believe that everyone should stick to their own craft, but personally I feel that these pretrial restrictions against Sergei Fedotov could have been more humane,” Mikhalkov said.