Pirate sites and copyright protection in Russia

Worldwide Copyright Protection

Main article: Copyright on the Internet

2024

Russian President Vladimir Putin softened responsibility for piracy in Russia

Russia Vladimir Putin The President signed a law mitigating criminal liability for violation of copyright and related rights. This document, published on June 12, 2024 on the website of legal acts, amends Articles 146 and 165 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

According to the new law, the acts provided for in parts 2 and 3 of Article 146 are recognized as committed on a large scale if the cost of copies of works or phonograms or the cost of rights to use copyright objects and related rights exceeds 500 thousand rubles, and on an especially large scale - 2 million rubles. Article 165 has also been amended: large size now recognizes the value of property exceeding 1 million rubles, and especially large - 4 million rubles.

The current thresholds for Article 146 were set in 2011 and for Article 165 in 2003, Justice Department officials said. The increase in thresholds is due to accumulated inflation. The explanatory note to the bill states that these changes will decriminalize about 26% of crimes under Article 146 and more than 20% under Article 165, which will also mitigate liability under the specified norms of the Criminal Code.

In January 2024, the Russian government submitted to the State Duma a bill aimed at liberalizing and humanizing criminal legislation in this area. It is expected that raising the thresholds of damage will mitigate liability in relation to approximately 40% of crimes under Part 3 of Article 146 and 28% of offenses under Part 2 of Article 165 of the Criminal Code.

According to Dmitry Sokolov, director of the Association of Software Suppliers, most of the cases initiated under Article 146 relate to copyright infringement of Russian software developers. He expressed concern that the latter could lose criminal protection.^[1]

The authority to block copies of pirated sites will pass from Ministry of Digital Development to Roskomnadzor

On January 25, 2024, a bill will be submitted to the State Duma providing for the transfer of powers to block the "mirrors" of pirated sites from the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation to Roskomnadzor. It is assumed that this will reduce the timing of the introduction of restrictions on access to illegal resources.

In accordance with the current scheme, blocking copies of pirated sites is carried out in three stages. Information about the illegal resource is first sent to the Ministry of Digital Development, where an examination is carried out during the day. After that, a copy of the decision of the department is sent to the owner of the site and to Roskomnadzor. At the final stage, the regulator turns to hosting providers, telecom operators and search engines, which during the day should restrict access to the "mirror" and stop issuing data about it on the Internet. All these actions can drag on for several days.

After the transfer of authority to block copies of pirated sites to Roskomnadzor, the access restriction process will take no more than two days. In addition, the new bill assumes that all search engines will be required to remove information about "mirrors" from search results. As of the end of January 2024, this should be done only by those search engines that distribute advertising on Runet.

Semenov & Pevzner Managing Partner Roman Lukyanov notes that the faster the blocking is implemented, the more effective it will be. In his opinion, the search engines themselves are interested in fighting pirates. At the same time, Ekaterina Abashina, a lawyer for the Central Control Commission of Moscow "DBA and Partners," believes that at the official level the system for blocking copies of pirated sites in Russia "is opaque." The fact is that the decision is made by Ministry of Digital Development based on the opinion of anonymous experts who evaluate sites according to several criteria. To recognize a resource as a copy of another site, even one criterion is enough: this can be, for example, the similarity of domain names.^[2]

2023

Russia counted 80 thousand pirated domains with Russian-language video content

In Russia, in 2023, 80 thousand pirated domains with Russian-language video content were discovered. This became known in August 2024 from a study by F.A.S.S.T. (formerly Group-IB), which notes a significant increase in the number of such resources in 2024.

According to Kommersant, in the first half of 2024 alone, 62 thousand new pirated domains were identified, which indicates an acceleration in the pace of their appearance. At the same time, there is a decrease in search query traffic to pirated portals by 7.9%, and the volume of the online piracy market for six months decreased by 9.5%, amounting to $19 million.

In Russia, in 2023, 80 thousand pirated domains with Russian-language video content were discovered

Experts attribute the reduction in traffic to the transition of users to legal online cinemas. However, the share of foreign content on pirated resources remains high - 72%, which is explained by the departure of foreign copyright holders from the Russian market and the cessation of protection of their content.

Despite the anti-piracy memorandum in force since 2018, signed by search engines and copyright holders, the fight against illegal content remains a difficult task. The document obliges to remove links to pirated resources from search results out of court, but its effectiveness is limited.

Large media companies continue to go to the courts to protect copyright. In August 2024, claims to the Moscow City Court were filed by Иви.ру LLC, TNT-Teleset JSC, Central Partnership Sales House LLC and others. The main defendant is the American company Cloudflare, which continues to work in Russia.

Representatives of legal online cinemas report active work to protect their content. In Yandex for 2023, 88.3 million links were removed from the issuance at the request of copyright holders. Okko focuses on protecting original series and exclusive broadcasts of sporting events. Wink uses the Wink Originals content collection and blocking system, the company told the publication.^[3]

Russia entered the top three countries in terms of pirated video content

Russia entered the top three countries in terms of pirated video content. This is evidenced by those published in January 2024. the results of a study conducted by MUSO (monitors piracy) and Kearney (specializes in consulting). Read more here.

Growth of the market for pirated books, films and music for 2 years by 71.4% to 12 billion rubles

The Russian market for pirated books, films and music in 2 years has grown by 71.4% - from 7 billion rubles in 2021 to 12 billion rubles in 2023. This is evidenced by the data of the InterMedia agency, published at the end of December 2023.

As RBC writes with reference to InterMedia material, previously the growth rate of the illegal services market was noticeably lower. So, in 2021, the revenues of this market increased by 17% compared to 2020 (from 6 billion to 7 billion rubles), in 2020 relative to 2019 - by 11% (from 5.4 billion to 6 billion rubles), the newspaper notes.

At the same time, the income of legal video services is not growing: in 2022, the turnover of online cinemas showed a drop of 13%, in 2023 - an increase of 3% to 89.7 billion rubles.

The head of InterMedia Yevgeny Safronov believes that Western cinema and music have gone into an illegal field, because users still want to receive content. He calls "piracy" in itself "useful for world IT monopolies," therefore, the effectiveness of the fight against it is low.

The population acquires equipment primarily to gain access to creative content, and the difficulty of this access is fraught with a decline in sales and a decrease in capitalization, Safronov added.

Work in the Russian market was suspended, including streaming services Netflix and Spotify. The decision to leave is associated with the adoption of a law on punishment for disseminating inaccurate information about the actions of the Russian military abroad.

Experts interviewed by RBC identified two segments of the audience of pirated resources: the first fundamentally does not pay for "open" content, the second searches only for content on pirated resources that did not remain in the legal field after the departure of Western platforms and film studios.^[4]

Roskomnadzor has developed a mechanism for blocking pirated sites for LGBT propaganda in video content

On November 20, 2023, it became known that Roskomnadzor (RKN), the Media Communication Union and copyright holders - participants in the anti-piracy memorandum are beginning to block pirated Internet resources that host videos with LGBT propaganda. The law on the complete prohibition of LGBT propaganda, pedophilia and gender change entered into force in Russia on December 6, 2022. Read more here.

The number of pirated domains on the Russian Internet increased in February by 64%

Angara Security specialists reported that the number of pirated sites is growing rapidly in the Russian segment of the Internet. According to experts, between February 1 and 10, 2023, the number of registered domains associated with pirated films and TV shows increased by 64%, compared with the same period in January. This became known on February 21, 2023.

The growth is caused by high demand for pirated content due to the imposed sanctions restrictions, as more and more popular foreign content is removed from legal online cinemas - this is what pirates use.

On February 1, 2023, Russian online cinemas removed the anthology of Harry Potter films and the Fantastic Beasts franchise. In addition, from March 1, more than 200 films of Disney, 20th Century Studios (Fox), Sony will be removed from the Kinopoisk online cinema. This includes "Zeropolis," "Ratatouille," "Die Hard," "Ice Age" and many other paintings.

The viewer is used to high-quality Western content and wants to watch it. He was taught to pay for it - he paid. Now on paid platforms, content is no longer available - the user goes to pirates, - said film critic and Izvestia columnist Sergei Sychev.

Roskomnadzor also confirmed the growth of pirated video services. According to the ministry, most of these services are created on the territory of Ukraine with the support of unfriendly countries. Since February 24, 2022, the ILV has blocked more than 4 thousand pirated Internet resources that were used to distribute fake materials about the progress of a special military operation in Ukraine and anti-Russian propaganda.

The task of pirated resources is not only to show films, but also to steal personal and payment data under various pretexts, such as paying for a video hosting subscription or participating in the "partner" online lottery, the expert told the publication.

He also noted that attackers use a more interesting method of fraud, namely obtaining remote access to the user's computer through video, which is hosted on pirated sites. The film is converted in such a way that when it is watched, a "tunnel" is created - a communication channel through which a hacker can access the user's files.

In addition, a function can be configured on such sites that determines that the user connects via the mobile Internet, after which he gives him an information window, when closing which a person automatically agrees to a paid subscription^[5] by ^[6]

2022

The volume of the online piracy market in Russia decreased by 10% over the year

On May 16, 2023, F.A.S.S.T., a Russian developer of technologies to combat cybercrime, announced that it estimated the Internet piracy market in Russia in 2022 at $45 million - in a year, illegal distributors of video content lost 10% of their income, and the number of pirated domains almost halved. Experts see the reasons in the successful blocking of pirated sites on which anti-Russian videos were shown, as well as in the departure of shadow sponsors of piracy from the country. Nevertheless, audience interest in the pirate is still high: for the first time, the share of mobile traffic to illegal cinemas reached 60% - pirated films and TV shows prefer to watch on a smartphone.

According to the company, every year over the past 8 years, a team of analysts at Digital Risk Protection has been releasing a study on the dynamics, trends and volume of the Russian Internet piracy market. According to experts, the income of Internet pirates continues to fall for the fifth year in a row. In 2019, the volume of the illegal video content market was $63 million, in 2020 - $59 million, in 2021 - $50 million, in 2022 decreased by another $5 million to $45 million.

In general, in 2022, the number of detected pirated pages with Russian-language video content decreased from 119.4 thousand in 2021 to 69 thousand resources. At the same time, for the first time in many years, the share of mobile traffic to pirated resources in 2022 reached 60% - illegal content is watched more from a smartphone than from a computer.

Geopolitical events have had a significant impact on the online piracy market, according to F.A.S.S.T. experts. At least three large pirated CDN players, which are built into 80% of all Russian-language sites with illegal video content, showed anti-Russian commercials. This led to the refusal to work with them of some pirates from Russia, as well as to the prompt identification and blocking of pages with similar content by Russian regulators.

The main sources of income for online pirates are still advertising online casino and. bookmakers However, due to the departure of several bookmakers financial translations CPM from the Russian market in 2022, as well as due to the complexity between the countries, the average (Cost-Per-Mille, the price for 1000 impressions in an advertising campaign) on pirated resources fell by 18%. Changes have also occurred in the environment of CamRip groups, which organize the process of illegal copying of film premieres, translation and voice acting, editing of commercials. One of the major CamRip groups, which previously specialized in illegal copying, voice acting and distribution of films in Russia, has expanded its content production chains abroad.

According to analysts at F.A.C.C.T., the decline in revenues of the online smuggler market is taking place in the face of growing demand for legal video content: in 2022, Russian viewers more actively watched films and TV shows on legal platforms, compared to 2021. But if traffic to pirate portals increased by 6%, then for legal streaming video services it increased by 15%.

Contrary to the concerns of the industry, with the departure of Western copyright holders in 2022, there was no dramatic increase in the activity of pirated resources. Due to the optimization of the monitoring and elimination of violations, the departure of some gray and illegal advertisers, the emergence of a mechanism for quickly removing links in search results, and the rejection of some CDN players, pirates did not wait for the "tailwind." We see that the existing tools reduce the number of illegal sources of video content and limit the access of pirated content to viewers. comments Stanislav Goncharov, Director of Business Development, Digital Risk Protection, F.A.S.S.T.

As part of cooperation with the Film Distributor's Bulletin, F.A.S.S.T. prepares monthly ratings of the most pirated films in Russia. For 4 months of 2023, the most popular film among pirates was the long-awaited sequel to James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water. In second place is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantum Mania. On the third - "Swindlers." And the leader of February "Cheburashka" and the film "Menu" closes the Top 5 of the most popular movie novelties among pirates.

Roskomnadzor reported an increase in the number of blocked pirate sites

In 2022, Roskomnadzor (RKN) received almost 20% more applications from copyright holders for copyright protection compared to 2021, as well as definitions of the Moscow City Court on preliminary blocking of resources for claims of owners of stolen content. This was reported in the department on January 23, 2023.

According to ILV statistics, in 2022, access to 350 thousand sites with pirated content was limited, which is 17% more than a year earlier. Roskomnadzor received 12.5 thousand definitions of the Moscow City Court and 38 thousand applications of copyright holders for copyright protection on the Internet. The service added that foreign and Russian copyright holders in 2022 began to apply to Roskomnadzor more often to protect their rights.

We want to note the responsible approach of site owners: 85% of them independently deleted illegal copies. Access to 41 thousand sites was limited to telecom operators, since pirated content was not deleted on time, the ILV said in a statement.

For the week of December 5-11, the register of blocked sites was replenished most actively in 2022. Access was closed to 14.8 thousand resources, which is three times more than the average weekly indicator of 2022 (4.9 thousand), Kommersant reports with reference to Roskomsvoboda.

The last time such an increase in the number of locks occurred in 2021, when 18.1 thousand sites were blocked in a week from April 19, 2021, and in 2018, when 13.4 thousand resources were blocked from April 23 to 30, 2018.

According to Karen Ghazaryan, general director of the Institute for Internet Research, the reason for such a surge in blocking can be purely formal: "the end of the year is approaching, it's time for reports." He noted that access to sites is often closed, to which no one would have paid attention outside the fact of blocking: "the logic of blocking does not always correspond to the proportionality of threats."^[7]

Book publishers ask the Central Bank and the Ministry of Internal Affairs to close pirates access to gray payment systems

The Russian Book Union asked the Central Bank, the Federal Tax Service and the Ministry of Internal Affairs to strengthen control over money transfers on pirated sites. This became known on January 11, 2022.

Illegal resources have learned to bypass the ban on servicing accounts by banks and sell digital copies of books through gray payment systems without withholding taxes, it follows from the text of the appeal. At the same time, such systems, as a rule, do not have a legal entity and a license of the Central Bank to organize money transfers. In his address, the President of the RKS did not disclose the details of which sites are in question.

The RKS notes that such hidden transfers of funds from card to card are dangerous for the buyer, since he will not be able to request the cancellation of the transaction through his bank if the pirated site after the transfer of funds does not open access to the purchased books.

The Book Union is confident that the number of crimes with gray payment systems would decrease if banks technically limited the use of their payment infrastructure for pirates^[8] the^[9].

2021

Revenues of pirated video services in Russia for the year fell by $9 million

In 2021, pirated video services Russia in earned about $50 million, which is $9 million less than a year earlier. Such data were released on July 21, 2022 by the company's experts. Group-IB

The fall of the illegal market, as stated in the study, was led by the effective blocking of transactions between Internet pirates and their main sponsors - online casino services and bookmakers - by Russian regulators, in particular the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the authors of the study say. This reduces the attractiveness of pirated sites for advertisers: in 2021, their average CPM (price per 1000 impressions in an advertising campaign) decreased from $5 to $3.9.

Another reason was the increased costs of supporting pirated infrastructure: the number of blocks of pirated resources in Russia in 2021 increased 2.5 times, owners of pirated sites needed new scripts to bypass locks, more costs to promote content in search services and purchase new domains, indicated in Group-IB.

Despite the increased interest of the domestic viewer in pirated content, and especially in those films that are not officially released in Russia, the pirated market continued to fall - and this is undoubtedly the merit of copyright holders and regulators on the one hand, and the emergence of advanced anti-piracy technologies, says Andrey Busargin, Deputy General Director of Group-IB in the direction of protection against digital risks. - The legalization of Internet piracy remains only at the level of conversations, but the emerging "initiatives" cannot but alarm: since May, "private" illegal screenings of a number of Hollywood films that were not officially published in Russia began, you can find proposals on the network for packing pirated copies into special DCP packages (digital format used by film distributors to distribute and show films in the cinema) and even recorded a collaboration of a pirated release group with legal business.[10]

Yandex has changed the rules for working with video hosting to combat piracy

From the beginning of 2022, Yandex will exclude video partners who have not signed anti-piracy agreements from search results. This became known on December 2, 2021. Read more here.

Anti-piracy memorandum extended in Russia

The anti-piracy memorandum, signed in November 2018, has been extended until February 2022, reports July 21, 2021 Roskomnadzor^[11]

"On July 21, at the Roskomnadzor site, an absentee meeting of the participants in the memorandum on cooperation in the protection of exclusive rights in the era of digital development was held. Industry representatives unanimously decided to extend the Anti-Piracy Memorandum until February 1, 2022, "the statement said.

It is noted that the anti-piracy memorandum is an example of successful self-regulation. After its signing on November 1, 2018, search engines and copyright holders established mutually beneficial cooperation to counter pirated content. After the appeal of the copyright holders, the search engines that signed the memorandum stopped issuing links to works illegally posted on the Internet. During the memorandum, about 25 million links to resources with pirated content were removed from search results.

The positive practical experience gained during the memorandum became the basis for the preparation of a bill aimed at combating the spread of pirated content. In June, the bill was submitted to the State Duma, recalls Roskomnadzor.

Representatives of the 12 largest producers of film and television products and Russian Internet sites became participants in the memorandum. The document introduced a pre-trial procedure for resolving controversial issues between copyright holders and search engines regarding the illegal placement of links to pirated content.

A bill has been submitted to the State Duma protecting the copyright of copyright holders on the Internet

2.5 years after the signing of the Memorandum of Cooperation on Combating Internet Piracy, a bill was submitted to the State Duma protecting the copyright of copyright holders on the Internet. This became known on June 18, 2021.

On November 1, 2018, copyright holders and search engines operators, through the mediation of Roskomnadzor (holder of the Memorandum), signed a Memorandum of Cooperation to Combat Internet Piracy. The document was signed by Channel One, VGTRK, STS Media, Gazprom-Media Holding, National Media Group, Association of Film and Television Producers, Association for Stimulating the Circulation of Legal Content on the Internet Internet Internet Video, Yandex, Mayl.Ru (on its own behalf and on behalf of the owners of Odnoklassniki and VKontakte services), Rambler Internet Holding, Kinoposk, ruform.

Initially, it was assumed that by September 1, 2019, the Memorandum will take the form of a legislative act. This was reported in the press service of Roskomnadzor. Since then, the document has been extended several times, and finally the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications Sergei Boyarsky submitted to the State Duma bill No. 1193590-7 "On Amendments to the Federal Law" On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection. "

This is the result of the great joint work of the industry and the regulator and a really significant step in the fight against Internet piracy, - explained Mikhail Demin.

Since 2018, the participants of the Memorandum have been using the proposed mechanism, so we are ready, "said Alexey Byrdin, General Director of the Internet Video Association. - The introduced bill correctly transfers the mechanism of the Memorandum to the regulatory framework in its original form. This is the beginning of fundamental changes in the approach to reducing the availability of pirated content on the Runet. The deputies of the current convocation will not have time to adopt the bill, so its consideration and revision will begin in the fall. My industry colleagues and I agreed to use this pause with benefit: we will analyze the text and prepare proposals for amendments in order to increase the effectiveness of regulation. Most of all, we are concerned about the issue of tougher measures against sites that commit multiple copyright violations.

Copyright holders rated the effectiveness of such a mechanism for protecting rights as very high, since its implementation led to an increase in the audience of legal Internet services. The implementation of the provisions provided for by the draft federal law will allow, taking into account the accumulated experience, to consolidate at the legislative level the mechanism for the protection of copyright and related rights, make it available to a larger circle of copyright holders, provide them with equal conditions for access to the protection of their rights, and also extend the obligation to stop issuing links to illegally placed on the network "Internet" works on all operating operators in the Russian Federation, search engines - said in an explanatory note to the bill.

So, over 2.5 years of the Memorandum, more than 23 million links to illegally posted content were removed from search results. The legislative consolidation of the provisions of the Memorandum will extend its effect from signatories to all market participants and will become an industry standard. Members of the Media Communication Union fully support this initiative and are ready to continue to participate in the development of new and improvement of existing anti-piracy initiatives, - said Mikhail Demin[12].

Yandex removed more than 15 million links to pirated content from search results

More than two years ago, Yandex and the largest copyright holders signed a Memorandum that helped create a mechanism for protecting copyright holders of audiovisual content. The partners agreed to quickly search for illegal audio and video content and remove it from search results. By March 2021, over 15 million links were removed. Six million of them were removed in less than three months of this year. Pirated content was hosted on more than 150,000 sites.

In the fight against illegal content, copyright holders play a key role - owners of the rights to films, TV shows, music, sports broadcasts and other content. They check the search results and add links to sites that violate their copyright to the register. These links disappear from Yandex search results within a few hours.

"As a search engine, we do not know and cannot determine the legal status of content hosted on third-party resources. Therefore, we are grateful to all copyright holders for their joint work to combat piracy in Russia. We hope that an equally applicable anti-piracy law, which will take into account the interests of copyright holders of all content formats, will create the necessary legal framework for systematic work in this direction, "commented Maxim Zagrebin, head of search products.

The most active copyright holders who submitted the most references to the register (data at the end of February 2021): Star Media - 5.5 million, VGTRK - 2.7 million, KinoPoisk - 1.7 million, TNT-Teleset - 1 million, "A Series" - 0.8 million, ivi - 0.7 million, Central Partnership - 0.5 million.

Thus, the seven largest copyright holders filed a total of 12.3 million links, which is 82% of the total register. Most of all, copyright holders asked to remove links to "Christmas trees," "Pun. Village of Fools, "" The Walking Dead, "" Comedy Club "and" Under the Laws of Wartime. "

Raising $25,000 for the purchase of hard drives to preserve especially rare distributions

At the end of February 2021, the Rutracker torrent tracker announced the collection of $25,000 (about 1.9 million rubles at the exchange rate at the time of the announcement) to buy hard drives necessary to store rare distributions - old and specialized programs released many years ago films, games, etc.

A crowdfunding campaign on Rutracker was announced at the end of December 2020. The required amount ($25 thousand) was collected in less than two months. At the same time, the site continues to accept donations by February 26, 2021.

Roskomnadzor gave more than 1,700 Russian sites to reprisals against foreigners

At the beginning of 2021, Roskomnadzor transferred to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO, World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO) information about more than 1,700 sites recognized as malicious copyright violators. Information about them, according to the regulator, has already been entered into the database in the special ALERT database, which is a secure online platform into which WIPO member countries can upload data on pirated sites^[13].

In total, Roskomnadzor contributed 1768 domain names to this database from October to December 2020 inclusive. The department has not yet published the data for January 2021, as well as the list of sites included in the WIPO database.

All these 1768 resources, as stated on the Roskomnadzor website, regularly posted information containing "objects of copyright and (or) related rights. For each of the resources, the Moscow City Court made decisions to restrict access on an ongoing basis in Russia in accordance with Article 15.6 of Federal Law No. 149-FZ "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection."

WIPO itself does not analyze sites and in order to identify the facts of copyright infringement. Moreover, the organization officially declares that it bears absolutely no responsibility for which sites fall into its ALERT database - everything is at the mercy of the regulators of those countries that are part of it.

Thus, adding a portal to the ALERT list does not mean its total and instant blocking. In fact, this database is, as stated on the website of WIPO itself, "a mechanism that allows member states of the organization and their institutions to exchange lists of sites that violate copyright in order to warn advertisers against advertising on such sites."

Advertisers from the countries participating in the organization can connect to ALERT - for this they need to contact WIPO with a corresponding statement. Once they have access, they can use the information in this database to set up their ad systems. At the time of publication of the material, WIPO did not charge for the use of ALERT

From all this it follows that after the portal appears in the ALERT list, its owners, in theory, may have problems attracting new advertisers, which in the future may result in a lack of funds for the development of the site.

2020

11 criminal cases against pirates initiated by Tricolor

Tricolor on March 24, 2021 announced the strengthening of measures to protect content from pirates.

The operator summed up the results of anti-piracy activities in 2020. During this period, at the initiative of the operator, law enforcement agencies initiated 11 criminal cases. Read more here.

Publishers asked Yandex and Mail.ru to start fighting book piracy

In September 2020, President of the Russian Book Union (RKS) Sergei Stepashin sent an appeal to the management of the Internet companies Yandex and VK (formerly Mail.ru Group), in which, on behalf of the book industry, he asked to organize the process of removing pirated links from search results out of court, as well as introduce on its sites technology for recognizing illegal copies of books by digital fingerprint. As Stepashin notes, copyright holders of creative industries spend hundreds of millions of rubles annually to search for and remove pirated content, Vedomosti reports.

The document contains a request to organize the process of removing pirated links from search results out of court, as well as to introduce technology for recognizing illegal copies of books on a digital fingerprint on its sites.

This technology is used by the VKontakte social network. All e-books that users upload are automatically compared with legal copies. If there is a match, the content is deleted.

According to the RKS, every year copyright holders of creative industries spend hundreds of millions of rubles to search for and remove pirated content.

Earlier it was reported that Russian search engines can connect pirated links to a special list. It is assumed that after prohibited links appear in the output, search engines will have to delete them within six hours.

Yandex accused of piracy for 3 billion

In August 2020, details of a lawsuit against Yandex by TeleSport Group, which owns the rights to show the Italian football championship in Russia, became known. Kommersant wrote about them, in the editorial office of which a copy of the Yandex document^[14].

The plaintiff accuses Yandex of violating the rights to cut the best moments of games (highlights) of three seasons and show videos in Yandex.video. The lawsuit will be considered on August 21, 2020 in the Moscow City Court. This is the largest lawsuit of its kind against Yandex, which, according to Kommersant, can be called precedent. Yandex simply indexed the information, and the Russian courts have not yet considered such claims.

The company's statement of claim contains 590 links to Yandex's search results. Based on the maximum possible compensation of 5 million rubles. for each violation, TeleSport Group demands a refund of 2.95 billion rubles.

In addition, TeleSport accused Yandex of violations regarding the content that the company itself posts on networks. Thus, 73% of controversial links are indexed by video videos posted in the official TeleSport groups and its Sila TV projects on the Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki networks. Many of these links take users to the highlights posted in Yandex.video from these groups. Another 22% of links lead to user videos on YouTube, and the remaining 5% to third-party sites.

The lawsuit contains additional information that in 2019 TeleSport and Yandex agreed to sell the rights to highlights, and the search engine could use them until December 31, 2019. However, after the agreement was not concluded, and Yandex.video continued to index the content. In April 2020, TeleSportGroup went to court.

Book publishers lose more than 55 billion rubles on piracy in Telegram

About 200 channels on Telegram distribute pirated copies of books, their total audience is 2 million people, Maxim Ryabyko, general director of the Association for the Protection of Rights on the Internet (AZAPI), told Vedomosti. This messenger is one of the largest sources of piracy in Runet, he says. AZAPI represents the interests of the largest book publishers - Eksmo-AST, Azbuka-Atticus, as well as legal online book stores - Litres. Even taking into account the fact that not all users viewing messages in pirated Telegram channels eventually download illegal content, publishers receive more than 55 billion rubles due to such canals. per year, AZAPI calculated. At the same time, the size of the entire book market in Russia, according to Eksmo-AST, amounted to 92 billion rubles^[15].

2019

Tricolor vs. Pirates

In 2019, criminal cases were initiated against 17 persons. The courts issued 10 convictions. Pirates operated in Vladimir, Volgograd, Kaluga, Moscow, Murmansk, Rostov, Smolensk regions, Krasnodar Territory, as well as in Bashkortostan, Dagestan and Ingushetia.

The results of the trials indicate recognition of the public danger of actions related to digital piracy. The courts ceased to consider such cases as extraordinary, approaches to assessing cases of illegal modification of receiving equipment became more individual. The range of punishments applied is expanding. Deprivation of liberty, albeit imposed as a conditional, or restriction of liberty ceased to be something exceptional.

I. One of the criminal cases ended for the pirate with an even harsher sentence. For the manufacture and distribution of modified smart cards, the Lermontovsky City Court of the Stavropol Territory found a resident of the city of Lermontov guilty of committing crimes, provided for by Part 2 of Art. 272 of the Criminal Code, part 3 of Art. 30 part 2 of Art. 273 of the Criminal Code, and sentenced to forced labor for a period of 1 year and 6 months with a 10% deduction from the convict's salary to the state's income monthly. The court also satisfied Tricolor's statement about the damage caused and ordered the pirate to pay the company 105,192 rubles. The convict found the sentence excessively harsh and tried to get it commuted by filing an appropriate complaint. In February 2019, the Stavropol Regional Court upheld the position of the court of first instance, reducing the term of forced labor by only 1 month.

In a number of recent cases - the case of a "pirate" from Ingushetia, convicted of distributing a modified smart card (part 2 of article 273 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). He failed to avoid criminal liability even despite the active line of his defense. The Magas District Court of the republic sentenced the accused to 3 years of suspended imprisonment with a probationary period of 1 year. The severity of the punishment was also probably influenced by the fact that the offender at the time of the crime was an authorized Tricolor dealer. By decision of Tricolor, the dealer agreement with the convict was unilaterally terminated.

"The judges base the sentences on the totality of the evidence available in the criminal case: witness testimony, physical evidence, expert opinion, etc. By virtue of the profession, judges are characterized by healthy skepticism and critical thinking. Therefore, it is naive to believe that if the accused at the hearing takes a position in the style of "did not know, was not involved, did not see," then the judge will immediately believe what was said without verification. The criminal prosecution is based on a whole chain of evidence, which is very difficult to refute, "says Alexey Mishushin, deputy director for legal affairs for judicial work at Tricolor.

Piracy costs offenders more and more every year. Residents of the Republic of Bashkortostan - Parkin M.N. and Vaulov V.V. (editor's note - names changed) - were found guilty of illegally using objects of copyright and related rights for selfish purposes. For illegal retransmission of the TV channels that are part of Tricolor, the Beloretsky interdistrict court sentenced Parkin to 2 years and 6 months in prison conditionally with a probationary period of 2 years. Vaulov received 2 years of suspended imprisonment with a probationary period of 2 years. In addition, the court satisfied in full the civil claims filed in the interests of Tricolor, totaling 5,569,171 rubles.

II. The company also monitors the facts of illegal broadcasting of TV channels in public places: hotels, restaurants, cafes, waiting rooms for transport hubs, sports clubs, car washes, etc. The absence of an appropriate agreement on the right to publicly display the content of the copyright holder entails administrative liability for organizations or individual entrepreneurs.

In 2019, the operator sent more than 50 allegations of violation of rights to law enforcement agencies and inspections were initiated for each of them to bring those responsible to administrative responsibility. As part of the pre-trial claim work, 18 contracts were concluded with the right to public and numbered display for a total amount of almost 700,000 rubles a year. As part of the arbitration proceedings, the operator managed to achieve positive decisions on two claims in the amount of 70,000 rubles. In another suit in civil proceedings, the offender agreed to pay compensation under the settlement agreement concluded in court.

III. Last year, Tricolor continued to fight against sites that illegally used the company's trademarks. Thus, the Kirovsky District Court of St. Petersburg satisfied the operator's claim in the amount of 50,000 rubles against the site administrator sputnik-tricolor.ru. A similar lawsuit was considered in the Sergiev Posad City Court of the Moscow Region against the site administrator www.tv3color.ru. For violation of rights, the portal administrator must pay Tricolor 60,000 rubles. Another process ended in a settlement. As part of the settlement of the dispute, the administrator of a number of domain names, in the name and content of which Tricolor trademarks were illegally used, paid compensation in the amount of 100,000 rubles and in addition reimbursed the legal costs incurred by the company.

For the first time in Russia, the owner of a pirated network of online cinemas was convicted

The Krasnogorsk City Court of the Moscow Region sentenced on December 19 the owner of pirated online cinemas, accused under Part 3 of Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ("Violation of copyright and related rights"). "Pirate" earned money from showing illegal video content - new films, popular films and TV shows. According to the court's verdict, the owner of a network of pirated online cinemas received 2 years probation - this is the first such judicial precedent in Russia.

In 2018 the experts of the Group-IB Anti-Piracy direction found the large network of piracy online movie theaters consisting of the resources kinogb.guru, kinokot.biz and fosa.me and also ten their "mirrors" among which there is kinogb.site, kinogb.me, kinogb.life, kinogb.cc, kinogb.mobi, kinokot.me, kinogb.tv. The pirate library of each site totaled more than 10,000 titles: the latest movie news and other popular films and TV series were posted here. "Pirate" received content from one of the largest pirated CDN (Content Distribution Network, content delivery network) - Moonwalk (ceased operation in October 2019). Advertisers of his pirated sites traditionally were online casinos - 1xbet and Azino777, which also supplied finished content through CDN providers with an advertising block already sewn into the video sequence.

As part of the work to protect the content of various copyright holders, Group-IB specialists have repeatedly warned the owner of the pirated network about copyright infringement of the legal owners of video products and demanded to stop illegal use of someone else's intellectual property. However, the "pirate" did not respond to warnings, and in case of technical blocking of his "mirrors" he created new ones. During the investigation initiated by the copyright holder, Group-IB managed to identify the digital traces of the criminal, and then establish his identity.

The owner of the kinogb network turned out to be a very secretive and cautious person - he did not have real accounts on social networks and registrations on forums, nevertheless, the specialists of the Group-IB investigation department were able to quickly get on his trail. During the operational-search activities carried out by the Investigative Department for the North-Eastern Administrative District of the Main Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee of Russia for the city of Moscow (SU for SVAO GSU SK RF) in the spring of 2019, the owner of the pirate network was detained in the Moscow region, he was charged under Part 3 of Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation "Violation of copyright and related rights," which provides for liability for the illegal use of copyright objects or related rights up to imprisonment for up to six years with a fine of up to five hundred thousand rubles or in the amount of the convict's salary or other income for a period of up to three years. During interrogation, the "pirate" confessed and agreed to cooperate with the investigation. The criminal case was sent to the Krasnogorsk City Court of the Moscow Region. However, in the trial, the defendant did not admit his guilt and refused the last word. In December 2019, the owner of pirate sites was found guilty and received 2 years in prison (probation) with a probationary period of 3 years.

"This case has created an important precedent for bringing the owners of pirated resources to criminal responsibility," says Andrei Busargin, head of the innovative intellectual property protection department at Group-IB. "Organized criminal groups work for pirates: some shoot videos in cinemas, others make a translation, others voice the picture, the fourth adapt and upload" pirates "to the network. Only criminal prosecution, combined with tougher anti-piracy laws, can lead to a decrease in the number of people wishing to engage in this illegal business. "

Group-IB: The Internet piracy market in Russia collapsed for the first time in five years

On October 31, 2019, the company Group-IB announced that for the first time in 5 years the market - not only Internetpiracies Russia stopped growing, but also showed a drop. Its volume amounted to $63.5 million, which is 27% lower than in 2018. Among the main reasons for the collapse in the income of Russian Internet pirates, Group-IB experts name - a blow to advertizing the model monetizations of pirated resources, the fall of the "Big Three" pirates, CDN which supplied up to 90 content % and the CIS, online cinemas in Russia as well as improving the legislative field and an anti-piracy memorandum. At the same time, the desire to watch illegally distributed films and TV shows among Russians has even grown.

As noted in Group-IB, over the past five years, the pirate market in Russia has grown at a catastrophically fast pace. Every year, in their reports, Group-IB experts pointed out the main factors that allow the shadow video content market to develop rapidly. Among them are powerful advertising support from illegal online casinos and bookmakers, an IT platform based on CDN technology taken by pirates into service, and traffic growth.

"Each of these components was dealt a powerful blow in 2019, which led to an unprecedented reduction in the volume of the Internet piracy market in the country. As a result, for the first time in the last five years, the online piracy market in Russia stopped growing and showed the opposite dynamics, actually shrinking to the level of 2016. The reasons were legislative changes in recent years, the widespread use of pre-trial blocking of pirated resources and, of course, tactical successes in the fight against piracy. So, for example, the active work of the Federal Tax Service against bookmakers and gambling led to the displacement of direct advertisers of pirated sites - for example, Azino777 lost the leading places in advertising, " noted' Andrey Busargin, Head of Intellectual Property Protection at Group-IB '

For the first time, specialists from the Group-IB Anti-Piracy department estimated the volume of the Russian video piracy market in monetary terms in 2015: then it amounted to $32 million, in 2016 it almost doubled to $62 million, in 2017 it amounted to $85 million (growth + 21%), in 2018 $87 million (growth + 2.3%). However, in 2019, for the first time in the last five years, there was a sharp collapse: the earnings of Internet pirates for the year decreased by 27% and approached $63.5 million.

Group-IB explained that the consistent adoption of anti-piracy laws has created a powerful legislative framework to combat online piracy in the form of "eternal" blocking of pirated websites and their "mirrors." Search engines also played against the "pirates." Improving search algorithms and pessimizing pages with built-in ads of all kinds (banners, pop-ups, substrates, ads built into the player, etc.) led to a reduction in the ability of pirates to place it and, as a result, to a drop in income. However, the "tectonic shift" in the fight against piracy ensured the signing in November 2018 of an anti-piracy memorandum with the participation of Yandex, Mail.Ru, Rambler, Channel One, VGTRK, STS Media, Gazprom Media. According to the signed directive, search engines are required to remove links to pages with pirated content from the results of the search results of users. In almost a year, copyright holders have added about 600,000 references to pirated copies of films and TV series to the register.

The monetization of pirated activities directly depends on the volume of advertising traffic. Group-IB Anti-Piracy experts have calculated that the average monthly advertising revenue from large pirated sites reaches about $10,000. The main advertisers of pirated films and TV series in recent years have been online casinos and gaming sites, while technically commercials on pirated resources are also posted through CDN providers and "pasted" into the video sequence. The liquidation in October 2019 of CDN Moonwalk, one of the largest pirated video content providers for Russia and the CIS, caused a chain reaction: problems began with the delivery of video content from two other large pirated CDN - HDGO and Kodik, which shared servers with Moonwalk in the Netherlands and worked under the "exchange agreement." As a result of the collapse of the Big Three - Moonwalk, HDGO and Kodik, according to Group-IB estimates, up to 90% of Russian pirated online cinemas were affected.

At the same time, Group-IB Anti-Piracy specialists note, despite the significant transformation of the piracy market in 2019, the desire of Russians to use free "piracy" compared to last year even increased slightly. The number of queries in popular search engines for watching free films and TV series on pirated resources for the year amounted to 10.4 billion (+ 0.06%).

"A radical change in 2019 is that not every intention to illegally watch a free film brought earnings to pirates. First of all, this is the result of the work of the memorandum: if earlier, even when removing pirated content, the viewer could still get to the pirated resource through the search engine, and, although he could not watch the film, the advertisement scrolled, and the earnings went to the pirates, then in 2019 the user even intentionally could not always get to pirated sites. The legislative field of the fight against piracy in Russia was covered many times and began to bear fruit: market participants learned to effectively use their rights and resolve issues related to the copyright for content in pre-trial order. However, piracy is an international problem, coordinated efforts at the international level to combat pirates are important - they are the ones that bring results, " noted Andrey Busargin, Head of Intellectual Property Protection at Group-IB

Rambler Group avoids record fine for 'pirate' football

The Moscow City Court partially satisfied the demands of Telesport Group in a lawsuit filed against the Rambler Group holding. He was accused of copyright infringement and distribution of illegal content, in particular,^[16] football records^[17].

Telesport Group's lawsuit could have become a record in Russian judicial practice in terms of the amount of the fine for copyright infringement if the court had satisfied the plaintiff's claims in full. According to the case card published on the official website of Moscow courts of general jurisdiction, Telesport Group wanted to recover 235 million rubles from Rambler Group.

Pirate Content Registries

Search engines operating in the Russian segment of the Internet, at the level of the law, will force almost instantly to remove links to pirated resources. They will be allocated no more than six hours for this, and they will do this without contacting the copyright holders in court^[18].

Amendments to the Law "On Information" necessary for the implementation of this restriction as of August 29, 2019 have been prepared. Their development, according to Vedomosti in August 2019, was jointly engaged in the largest Russian television companies and online cinemas, and the Internet giant Yandex and the VK holding (formerly Mail.ru Group) took part in the process. Roskomnadzor oversaw the development.

In order for search engines to quickly remove links to pirated content from their output, they will connect to a special registry of pirated links. A separate company will be responsible for maintaining and filling out the register, which will be chosen by the copyright holders and approved by Roskomnadzor. At the same time, the number of such registers, as well as the companies working on them, will not be limited, which will give copyright holders freedom of choice.

After the amendments to the Law "On Information" come into force, search engines will be allocated 10 days to connect to the selected registers. The changes will affect both Russian and foreign search engines, including Google. Search engines will remove links to sites that distribute illegal copies of films and TV shows, software, as well as music and books. The list of exceptions includes only photos - links to resources with photo content will retain their place in the issue.

Copyright holders want to remove pirated sites from search results

Copyright holders proposed to remove pirated sites from search results in pre-trial order. According to Vedomosti, Gazprom-Media, VGTRK, National Media Group and Channel One, Roskomnadzor asked in July 2019 to add to the new anti-piracy amendments a rule on the pre-trial removal of pirated domains from search results.

If the offer is accepted, copyright holders will have more opportunities to block pirated sites. In their opinion, removing only individual pages with pirated links from search engines is not enough. If one page is deleted, a link to pirated content will immediately appear on another and will be available again through a search, copyright holders explain. Resources that regularly violate copyright should not be present in search results at all, they are sure.

The authors of the initiative propose to consider the presence of ten or more links with pirated content on the site as a reason for pre-trial removal of the resource from search results.

The rule on pre-trial blocking of pirated sites may be included in the draft anti-piracy law, which should be submitted before September this year. However, at the moment Roskomnadzor considers it unfinished. The department believes that the ability to block the entire resource can provoke a wave of abuse.

The Federal Tax Service (FTS) has entered 30 portals distributing video content into the register of prohibited sites

The first site was blocked back in February 2019 filmm.ru. In mid-June FTS , it initiated access restrictions on another 29 sites. At the moment, three of them have already been blocked, reports RosComSvoboda"."

The Federal Tax Service received the right to block Internet resources under the law banning gambling in 2015. Since that moment, tax authorities have initiated the blocking of more than 47 thousand sites, including online casinos, sweepstakes, lotteries and poker portals.

A large scientific library has been forever blocked in Russia

In Russia, the online library Library Genesis (LibGen) has been "forever" blocked. The decision to block was made by the Moscow City Court at the suit of the publishing company Springer Nature Limited against the provider IP Volume Inc.^[19].

The lawsuit was intended to protect the rights to works of scientific literature "Current and Future Antiaggregate Therapy: An Emphasis on the Preservation of Hemostasis" and "Advances in Lipid Reduction Therapy with Silencer Gene Technologies." The company required the provider to stop creating technical conditions for accessing these texts on the lgmag.org and libgen.io. sites.

In addition, the plaintiff sought to restrict access to the sites themselves. At the moment, the sites are entered by Roskomnadzor in the register of prohibited resources, the corresponding records are dated June 21. The decision to block was made by the court in April.

What is LibGen

LibGen is a collection of articles and books with free access and searchability. The topics of the texts cover various fields of science. The library has works that are not found anywhere else in the public domain, or at all are not presented anywhere else in digitized form.

The library was founded by Russian scientists in 2008. As of June 2018, LibGen had more than 2.7 million books and 58 million publications from scientific journals.

Among other things, the library contains PDF copies of works posted on the ScienceDirect portal of the large scientific publishing house Elsevier, based in the Netherlands. In 2015, Elsevier sued LibGen for violating the rights to works. In response, the library accused the publisher of making money from publishing the results of research conducted with taxpayer money. According to the creators of the library, these results should be freely available.

LibGen is registered simultaneously in Russia and Amsterdam, so it is not entirely clear what legislation should be applied to it. Decisions to block the library at different times were made in the UK and the USA.

Decrease in the growth rate of pirated traffic in Russia to 10%

On June 10, 2019, it became known that the growth rate of pirated traffic on the Internet decreased in Russia. If earlier it was at the level of more than 20%, then in 2019 it was 10%. At the same time, traffic to legal cinemas grew fourfold. The industry stated that positive results were achieved thanks to the action of the "anti-piracy memorandum."

Representatives of content manufacturers, copyright holders, IT companies, telecom operators and the regulator discussed the results of the "anti-piracy memorandum" signed in November 2018.

The General Director Group-IB Ilya Sachkov stated that in 2019, for the first time in Russia, the growth of pirated traffic on the Internet fell to 10%. For comparison, in 2018 it reached 12%, and before that it was at the level of at least 20%.

As the head of Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov reported, as of June 2019, 330 thousand pirated resources were identified, which were removed from Yandex search results. According to Yandex, traffic to legal cinemas has quadrupled since the memorandum was signed. The Moscow City Court has already issued 540 decisions, on the basis of which 2,300 pirated resources were blocked.

According to the regulator, all registered resources consistently lost advertising - from 50% to 90%. "For example, RuTracker, which many continue to watch through VPN, has lost 80% of advertising," Alexander Zharov shared the numbers. The fact is, he explained, that piracy exists by combining illegal businesses. As an example, he cited advertising for pirated online cinemas of the Azino 777 casino ("Azino Three Axes"). According to the results of the first quarter of 2019. As Mediascope recorded, Azino 777 took only 60th place in the list of the largest customers of video advertising on desktops. The share of this advertiser in the total video ads (taking into account self-advertising) in January-March 2019 was only 0.3%. Whereas a year earlier, the Azino 777 ranked first with 6.7% by a wide margin from its competitors.

Vyacheslav Murugov, General Director of STS Media LLC, noted that the assets of the National Media Group and STS Media filed a total of more than 300 thousand applications for pirated links and saw a positive effect.

Previously, when comparable films "Ice" and "Attraction" were released, we lost 10 million rubles every hour on the first weekend.

The participants in the discussion assured the audience that positive results were achieved thanks to the action of the "anti-piracy memorandum." Based on the signed document, the industry has already prepared a bill. According to Alexander Zharov, he is in a high degree of readiness.

President of the Media Communication Union (ISS) Mikhail Demin stated the growth of the content payments market. He referred to the data of TMT-Consulting, Telecom Daily and EY, according to which at the end of 2018, payments for video content exceeded 100 billion rubles. against 92 billion rubles. in 2017

On the other hand, the ISS notes that illegal consumption is one of the significant factors in limiting market growth. Only during the World Cup in 2018, 27 thousand points of distribution of pirated traffic were recorded, while there were only three legal copyright holders.

The current mechanisms allow you to block content for six hours. Obviously, it is impossible to block this with your hands, so an effective technical solution is needed, supported by the legislative framework, 'noted Mikhail Demin, President of the Media Communication Union (ISS) '

He was supported by Alexey Krasnov, Deputy General Director of Gazprom-Media Holding JSC (GMH). He stressed that the holding conducts 11 thousand hours of live broadcasts per year. According to the deputy head of the GMH, in almost 100% of cases it is pirated.

[[:Шаблон:Quote 'author = emphasized Alexey Krasnov, Deputy General Director of Gazprom-Media Holding JSC]]

According to ivi forecasts, in 2020, already a third of the media market in the field of video consumption will be Internet or online video. Oleg Tumanov, CEO of ivi (Иви.ру LLC), based on data from the Cinema Fund, ComScore, Telecom Daily and J'son & Partners, said that the Russian OTT VoD market occupies only 0.4% of the world ($300 million versus $68.7 billion). At the same time, film distribution occupies five times the global market share compared to OTT VoD. Russia in the world film distribution ($41.7 billion) accounts for almost 2% ($800 million). Oleg Tumanov notes that these figures just show the price of piracy in Russia.

Koh Jean, President of the MOIBA Korean Mobile Internet Business Association, raised an important problem with the illegal use of content in his country. According to him, YouTube does not filter illegal content in any way or comply with the recommendations of the South Korean government on filtering. This problem in Russia also has to be solved. Alexander Zharov noted that the draft law being developed will also oblige foreign platforms to mirror the proposed measures.

Although the share of traffic from Yandex thanks to participation in the "anti-piracy memorandum" to pirated sites decreased by a quarter (as of June 2019, it accounts for 15% of all traffic), at the same time, traffic from other sources (social networks and instant messengers) to pirated sites increased by 44%. This is stated in a study by Yandex and Similar Web. Ilya Sachkov also warns that the pirates did not stop at all. According to Group-IB, they have found a new growth point - mobile devices. As a result, the share of pirated content consumption from mobile devices increased from 23% to 31%.

Channel One CEO Konstantin Ernst noted that in Germany - about 80-90% of legal views, in the UK - 50%, and in Russia - about 10%. Even according to the most optimistic confessions of the Internet sites themselves, they control only a quarter of audiovisual content online. Search engines give out 75% of pirated traffic. Konstantin Ernst admitted that in just one day he found 54 pirated copies of the series "Chernobyl" produced by HBO^[20].

Yandex has reduced the number of links to pirated copies of films and TV series

In the fall of 2018, when searching for the names of many fresh film premieres or TV series, the search engine issued links to many illegal copies of such content and provided them with the ability to view them inside its video service. But now Yandex.Video users may not find a pirated copy of new Hollywood and domestic films and TV series, Vedomosti was convinced in May 2019. Correspondents of the publication tried to watch such new films as Venom, Glass, How to Train the Dragon 3, T-34, Policeman from Rublevka, Ice through the Yandex video service - there are more than 40 films in total, as well as more than 10 TV series. With separate exceptions, they were unable to find links to such content outside of well-known legal online cinemas and YouTube.

Vedomosti sources confirmed that the number of pirated links in Yandex.Video has sharply decreased, and this primarily applies to illegal copies of films and TV series of companies that signed the so-called anti-piracy memorandum. They believe that this may be due to the fact that Yandex began to fully use the data collected by the robot to clean the video service.

Yandex reported that they are constantly working to improve the quality of ranking and regularly update search algorithms. "You may be seeing the results of one of these updates," a company spokesman said.

Popular anime sites have been forever blocked in Russia, although they have deleted all pirated content

By decision of the Moscow City Court, several popular anime portals were blocked on Runet. The reason for the blocking was the placement of anime series licensed by a Russian company there, according to the Roskomsvoboda resource. The sites immediately deleted the indicated series at the request of the copyright holder, and at the time of the decision of the Moscow City Court, there was no more controversial content there. But this fact did not help to avoid blocking - the court limited access to portals because the series were placed there in the past and may be placed in the future^[21] were^[22].

LLC Cinema Galeksi which complained in court of the websites smotretanime.ru, animeteatr.tv, animebest.org, animedia.tv, shikimori.org, animespirit.ru, big-anime.ru, sovetromantica.com, animevost.in, adultmult.tv and yandere.tv acts as a plaintiff in this case.

Series licensed to "Cinema Galexi" include a 2015 anime release called Charlotte - this series and was a sticking point in a recent lawsuit. Earlier, the same copyright holder complained about the illegal placement on the same sites of the TV series "Your Name" and "Your April Lie."

From the specified websites for life were blocked by animespirit.ru, big-anime.ru, animevost.in, adultmult.tv, yandere.tv and shikimori.org. Subsequently, the animevost.in and adultmult.tv were unlocked. The hosting provider, including CloudFlare, Inc., which is being held by one of the defendants in the case, was banned by the court from creating technical conditions for the operation of blocked sites.

Decisions to block pirated content will be checked by independent authorities

Court decisions on blocking pirated content on the Internet will begin to be checked by independent courts: separate appeal and cassation courts, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports in May 2019, citing a resolution of the plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, which explains some aspects of protecting intellectual rights^[23].

Appeals and cassation appeals against such decisions will be considered not within one court, but by separate appeals and cassation courts: the First Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction and the Second Court of Cassation of General Jurisdiction.

It is clarified that the Moscow City Court in 2018 made 9.7 thousand decisions to block content on pirated sites. Vyacheslav Gorshkov, a judge of the Supreme Court, stressed during the discussion of the decision that decisions on blocking are not automatically made. The refusal rate is quite high: between January 1, 2018 and April 3, 2019, the court rejected 3,701 applications for blocking.

At the same time, the existing mechanism allows copyright holders to quickly remove pirated content. De jure, this is the adoption of preliminary interim measures. If site owners have the right to distribute content, they can prove it in court, and the resource is unlocked.

Pirate will be severely punished for hacking and selling Tricolor equipment

The Stavropol Regional Court in an appeal ruling confirmed in April 2019 the verdict passed by the Lermontov City Court of the Stavropol Territory to a resident of the city of Lermontov, who for almost two years were engaged in the modification and sale of receiving equipment with the possibility of illegal access to paid channels. Tricolor This was reported on the operator's website. The man was sentenced to 1 year and 5 months of forced labor with a 10% deduction from wages to income states monthly. The court also ordered the pirate to pay Tricolor compensation in the amount of 105,192. ruble The operator calls this punishment one of the most severe sentences in Russia for digital TV piracy in recent years.

The attacker was detained in January 2016 as part of a verification purchase organized by employees of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Stavropol Territory. He tried to sell the receiver to an operative who acted as a buyer for 2000 rubles.

In December 2018, the Lermontovsky Court of the Stavropol Territory found the defendant guilty of committing crimes under Part 2 of Article 272 ("Unlawful access to computer information protected by law"), Part 3 of Article 30 ("Preparation for a crime and attempted crime") and Part 2 of Article 273 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ("Creation, use and distribution of malicious programs for computers"). He fully admitted his guilt, but then appealed the verdict to the next court as too harsh. As a result, the Stavropol court reduced the sentence by 1 month.

Medinsky criticized the existing anti-piracy legislation

The head of the Ministry of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky, said in March 2019 that the current anti-piracy legislation is a system for covering theft of the income of film authors, RNS reports, citing Medinsky's statement at the final meeting of the board of the Ministry of Culture.

"In terms of increasing the blocking of pirated sites, we have a philosophical discrepancy with the Ministry of Communications and with some of our digital companies. We will call a spade a spade. The system that we have is a theft cover system. Copyright is stolen, the property of commercial entities is stolen, which invest huge forces, time, their talent in the creation of films, "said Vladimir Medinsky

.

At the same time, he noted that as a result, piracy turns into embezzlement of budget funds, since they make up a significant part of the financing for the production of a number of films.

Webkontrol: in 2018, the number of pirated sites in Russia increased by 43%

In 2018, the number of pirated sites in Russia increased by 43%, to 9.5 thousand, follows from the data of WebKontrol, which in 2017 recorded a decrease in the number of such web resources by 10%.

The bulk of pirated resources fall on streaming sites - their share is 71% of the total number of sites with unlicensed content. In 2018, there were 6.5 thousand of them against 4.5 thousand a year earlier, Kommersant writes with reference to WebKontrol information. The number of torrent sites increased from 1.3 thousand in 2017 to 2 thousand in 2018. Their share among all pirated sites increased from 17% to 22%.

WebKontrol notes that sites with torrents choose to download games and software - that is, content that cannot be used online. Torrents also offer content at its best and often become sources for streaming venues. On such sites, in 87% of cases, the first unlicensed copies of films appear. On average, pirates posted 2-8 thousand illegal links per year for each major cinema premiere.

WebKontrol also discovered 27,000 pirated broadcasts of 25 matches of last year's World Cup. They were mostly conducted on social media.

According to a report by WebKontrol, torrent sites remain the leaders in the volume of pirated content posted. Moreover, the share of illegal links posted on them increased by 14% compared to last year - from 24% to 38%^[24].

The second position is occupied by file sharing, but their share in the total volume of pirated content for the year decreased from 38% to 34%. UGC sites "fell" from 25% to 15% and took the third position in terms of illegal links. At the same time, streaming sites showed an increase of 2% - from 8 to 10%. The last place in terms of links to pirated content is occupied by aggregator sites, the share of which decreased from 5 to 3% over the year.

This year, as in the past, Russia was included in the Priority Watch List, a list of countries "with serious shortcomings in the field of protection of intellectual property rights and requiring increased attention," published in the Special Report 301 of the US Trade Mission.

The trade representative indicates in a separate report "Notorious Markets List" several of the largest pirated sites that are hosted on Russian hosting or are allegedly managed from Russia. Among them are the file sharing Rapidgator.net and the online platform Seasonvar.ru. According to WebKontrol, hosting pirated sites with content in Russian is located in at least 50 countries around the world.

At the same time, Russia rose from 111 to 84 positions in The International Property Rights Index due to an improvement in the situation in the field of patent law protection. However, the level of piracy in the country, according to the authors of the Index, remained unchanged.

As part of the anti-piracy memorandum, Yandex removed 30 thousand links from search results

The register of page pointers with pirated content, created as part of an anti-piracy memorandum, contains almost 30 thousand links. Internet companies that have signed this document (Yandex, Mail.ru, Rambler and Rutube) are required to remove these links from their search results.

As the president of the Media Communication Union (this organization is the holder of the register) Demin Mikhail told Interfax in January 2019, on average every day copyright holders declare 200-300 facts of violation of their rights. Demin also added that work on creating a software registry solution is proceeding as planned and will be completed within the allotted time. Yandex noted that the links present in the registry are automatically removed from search results.

The anti-piracy memorandum was signed on November 1, 2018. Its participants were Russian Internet resources and copyright holders (STS-Media, Gazprom-Media, National Media Group, Channel One, VGTRK). The agreement, in particular, spells out a mechanism for removing links to Internet resources from search results that contain unlicensed content, the rights to which belong to media companies that have signed the document. So, within three weeks from the date of signing of this memorandum, copyright holders must create a register of page pointers of sites on which audiovisual works are posted without legal grounds. Internet services must contact the register every five minutes and remove the links posted there from the search results within six hours.

2018

Administrative responsibility for facilitating access to illegal content

On September 26, 2018, it became known that administrative liability came into force for search engines operators in the form of a fine for assistance in accessing illegal content established by the Federal Law of June 27, 2018 No. 155-FZ "On Amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation."

Thus, now search engines operators are obliged to connect to the federal information system and close routing to sites entered in its register of prohibited resources. Operators will begin to be fined for issuing links to such resources. Thus, the fine for individuals will be from 3 thousand to 5 thousand rubles, for officials - from 30 thousand to 50 thousand rubles, for legal entities - from 500 thousand to 700 thousand rubles.

Administrative punishment was also introduced for providers and anonymizers - for failure to provide Roskomnadzor with data on the owners of blocking bypass tools to access prohibited sites. For citizens, the fine will be from 10 thousand to 30 thousand rubles, for officials - from 30 thousand to 50 thousand rubles, and for legal entities - from 50 thousand to 300 thousand rubles.

To prevent blocking with the help of special software, penalties will apply to all proxy and VPN services, as well as to anonymous networks like Tor.^[25]

Agreement to remove links to sites with illegal content from search engines

On September 20, 2018, it became known that Russian copyright holders, Internet companies and Roskomnadzor are discussing an agreement on a mechanism for pre-trial removal of links to sites with illegal content from search engines, while Yandex is ready to sign the document only with Google and VK (formerly Mail.ru Group).

It is expected that either an existing or created association will filter pirated content. Its specialists will check the sent links to pirated copies and the rights to content through, base Moscow City Court which considers complaints from copyright holders. Then such links will be entered in a special register.

Yandex said it agreed to such a measure, and representatives of Mail.Ru Group asked for time to consider^[26] on^[27].

Assessment of Internet piracy in Russia for 2017

On September 5, 2018, it became known that Group-IB estimated the volume of the Internet piracy market in Russia for 2017. According to experts, its growth was 21% compared to 2016 and reached $85 million.

Specialists from Group-IB Anti-Piracy, which protects intellectual property on the Internet, calculated that the number of requests in popular search engines for watching films and TV shows for free amounted to almost 10 billion per year. Thus, on average, based on the total audience of the Internet last 2017 in Russia (~ 90 million), for each user on average there are about 110 views of pirated copies of films. The increase in the number of thefts of content from cinema screens brought the number of pirated copies of films to 211 units in 2017, more than 6 times the figure a year earlier (33 "screens"). At the same time, in the first 9 months of 2018 alone, the number of published "screens" has already exceeded 280 copies. Thus, almost every film released in 2018 was copied by pirates and posted on the network.

Group-IB analysts state that the phenomenon of Internet piracy is globalizing and becoming an established business with its technology platform. The past 2017 showed that to quickly deliver films and TV series to users, simplify the monetization scheme and autocomplete the site with illegal video content, CDN technology (Content Distribution Network, content delivery network) is increasingly used. As a rule, pirated CDN combines many servers around the world with specialized software that speed up the "delivery" of content to the end user. At the same time, the CDN infrastructure is created in such a way that the response time to site visitors is minimal: if a user from Moscow wants to download the video that interests him, the CDN network server closest to Moscow will turn on.

In fact, anyone can create their own pirated resource using an available automatic script and connect a module that simplifies the placement of content: a working player from a pirated CDN will appear on the page, through the technology of which the ability to quickly deliver content to the user is already organized. Next, you can only configure SEO to optimize your search. Access to an extensive content base on the one hand and an understandable monetization scheme on the other, allow you to create a pirated turnkey site in some 10 - 15 minutes.

The monetization of pirated activities directly depends on the volume of advertising traffic, more than 75% of which is accounted for by search engines. Group-IB Anti-Piracy experts calculated that the total volume of video pirate traffic in 2017 increased by 12% and continues to grow.

Commercials on pirated resources are also posted through CDN providers and "pasted" into the video sequence. The volume of embedded advertising allows us to draw an unambiguous conclusion: the main advertisers of pirated films and TV series are online casinos and gaming sites. The average earnings of pirates for 1000 views is $3. Thus, the average monthly income from large pirated sites can reach $10,000. It is curious that the very creation of a pirated resource takes about $240, which means that its payback begins with 80,000 video views on the portal.

Roskomnadzor remained satisfied with the decision of Yandex

Roskomnadzor found no reason to restrict access to the Yandex.Video service. The regulator, we recall, gave the search engine time until the evening of August 30 to remove the illegal content of the Gazprom-Media TV channels.

"The audit conducted by Roskomnadzor specialists showed that there are currently no grounds for restricting access to the Yandex.Video service," the press service of the RSpectr department quoted in August 2018.

The search engine had to remove illegal videos on the basis of the decision of the Moscow City Court. The channels included in Gazprom-Media filed a lawsuit. Yandex did not agree with the requirements, announced its intention to challenge the lawsuit and referred to the fact that, being a search engine, it could not remove pirated content on a third-party site. The holding responded by saying that Yandex not only provides links to such content, but also gives users the opportunity to watch it right in the Yandex.Video service window.

3.4 thousand pirated resources are constantly blocked in Russia

Access to 3.4 thousand Internet resources is limited in Russia on an ongoing basis due to copyright infringement as part of the fight against piracy. These sites repeatedly and unlawfully posted multimedia content in violation of copyright or related intellectual property rights. These resources were entered by Roskomnadzor into the register of pirated sites for blocking by telecom operators, according to the regulator in July 2018^[28].

Decisions on permanent blocking were made by the Moscow City Court (302 decisions) and the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications (2,286 decisions regarding the "mirrors" of pirated sites previously blocked by the court on an ongoing basis) on the basis of statements by copyright holders regarding torrent trackers, online cinemas and music services. Multiple sites or pages of sites can be specified in each solution.

The search engines Yandex, Mail.ru, Rambler, Sputnik and Google operating in Russia have also stopped issuing information about pirated Internet resources blocked on an ongoing basis. This duty is assigned to search engines after the entry into force of the relevant amendments to the law "On information, information technology and information protection."

Bill on blocking applications with pirated content adopted in the first reading

As it became known on July 11, 2018, State Duma deputies in the first reading approved a bill that allows restricting access to mobile applications with content that violates copyright. The document was submitted to the State Duma on February 12.

As noted in the explanatory note to the bill, in Russian legislation there is the term "information resource," but there are various approaches to its interpretation. In this regard, copyright holders have difficulties restricting access to "programs for electronic computers with which copyright objects are distributed." According to the authors of the document, the bill is designed to eliminate this uncertainty.^[29]

Study: Pirate sites' audience dwindles after 'mirrors' law passed

After the adoption in October 2017 of the law on blocking the "mirrors" of pirated sites, traffic to such resources decreased by almost 30%. However, in February of this year, the fall stopped.

Such data follows from a study by the Internet Video Association, Kommersant writes in June 2018. It says that in October 2017, the total audience of pirated sites was 153.8 million visitors, in November it decreased to 116.6 million, and in December - 97.4 million. Attendance at legal online cinemas during this period increased - from 20.1 to 24.5 million.

The downward trend in traffic on pirated sites was traced to February 2018, when their audience fell to 88.6 million, but in March it grew to 95.4 million.

According to the head of the Internet Video Association Alexei Byrdin, the problem is that after the mass blocking of "mirrors" of sites with unlicensed video content, legal services did not rise in the issuance of Yandex, as they are replaced by all new pirated sites. According to him, users spend a lot of time at pirated online cinemas, so the Yandex search engine raises them higher than the legal ones, from which the user can quickly leave without wanting to pay.

In May, at an anti-piracy session held as part of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Oleg Tumanov, General Director of the ivi online cinema, cited SimilarWeb data, according to which Yandex's share in search traffic of the top 10 largest pirated resources is 78%.

Earlier this month, Russian content producers and distributors sent an open letter to Yandex calling for the removal of links to pirated resources from search results. The authors of the letter proposed to agree and use the regulations for interaction between Yandex and copyright holders in order to restrict access to pirated sites within the framework of the Memorandum on the inadmissibility of the spread of illegal resources.

The press service of Yandex told Kommersant that the company's search engine operates in full compliance with the law. And they added that copyright holders have "unprecedented opportunities" to block illegal sites and their "mirrors." The company also stressed that watching online videos and forming a habit of paying for content is not a quick way.

Bill on fines for links to pirated sites adopted in the third reading

The State Duma adopted in June 2018 in the third, final reading a bill that provides for fines for search engines that are not connected to the register of prohibited resources. For this you will have to pay up to 700 thousand rubles, writes "Parliamentary newspaper."

Separate fines are introduced for issuing links to prohibited resources and their "mirrors" in search engines. Citizens for this will have to pay 3-5 thousand rubles, officials - 30-50 thousand, legal entities - 500-700 thousand rubles.

The same bill provides for responsibility for hosting providers and anonymizers for failure to provide data on the owners of resources to bypass locks. The fine for citizens will be 10-30 thousand rubles, for legal entities - 50-300 thousand rubles.

Russian users are the second most visited pirated sites

Global piracy growth rose 1.6% in 2017. The number of visits to pirated sites amounted to 300.2 billion. More than a third of this number fell on a site with television content - 106.9 billion. In second place were resources with music - 73.9 billion, in third - with films (53.2 billion), writes Advanced Television, citing MUSO data^[30].

The United States topped the list in terms of the number of visits - 27.9 billion, Russia took second place with 20.6 billion. Both leaders are confidently ahead of the rest, because the third person involved in the list, India, had 17 billion visits to pirated sites in 2017. In addition, several more countries with more than 10 billion visits to pirated resources were in the ranking - Brazil, Turkey, Japan, France, Indonesia and Germany. The UK closes the top ten with 9 billion visits.

"There

is a perception that the rise in popularity of on-demand services such as Netflix and Spotify has solved the piracy problem, but this theory falls short of expectations. Our data suggest that piracy is more popular than ever, "notes Andy Chatterley, co-founder and chief executive of MUSO. "With data showing that 53% of all piracy occurs on unlicensed streaming platforms, it became clear that streaming is the most popular way for consumers to access content, whether through legitimate channels or illegal."

Data from the company suggests that visits to sites with pirated TV content have grown by 3.4% worldwide since 2016. At the same time, for the first time, mobile platforms were ahead of the desktop - the share of visits through mobile devices increased to 51.92%. The bulk of visits are to streaming sites, with torrents accounting for only 5%.

The use of sites to access pirated films in 2017 decreased by 2.3%. In addition, users predominantly used streaming sites. They accounted for 32.4 billion visits, compared with 10.3 billion visits to torrents and 10.1 billion visits to download sites. In this category, the share of mobile access also increased significantly, but the desktop still accounted for 50.09% of visits. In 2018, however, mobile platforms are expected to be more popular for piracy.

At the same time, torrent piracy of films also increased globally by the end of 2017. This may be due to the fact that users are disappointed with the blocking and closure of their usual streaming sites and are reading back to proven and more traditional methods of piracy.

The State Duma of Russia will consider a bill to block pirated applications

In February 2018, a bill was submitted to the State Duma of the Russian Federation that will allow blocking applications that violate copyright. This was reported in the Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications.

"This clarification of the law has long been expected by the industry," TASS quoted him as saying. According to him, there has long been a loophole in the law that allowed pirates, having fulfilled the set of formal requirements necessary to place their application in app stores, to "profit" from smartphone users. "Now this gap is closing, and the possibilities of Russian legislation to protect authors are brought into full compliance with the modern level of technology," said the head of the committee Leonid Levin.

Social network "VKontakte" - in the American list of the largest pirated sites

VKontakte social networks were included in the updated list of the 25 largest pirated sites compiled by the US Department of Commerce. In addition to the social network, the list also includes such Russian projects as Rutracker, Rapidgator and kinogo, Interfax reported in January 2018. Read more here.

2017

The number of blocked pirate sites in Russia has grown 4 times

The number of Russia sites with pirated content blocked quadrupled in 2017 and amounted to 8 thousand. In 2016, this figure was 2 thousand resources, they write "" News with reference to the data. Roskomnadzor

The number of sites blocked on an ongoing basis for multiple violations has also grown - from 107 in 2016 to 530 in 2017. Another 459 "mirrors" of pirated sites were also blocked forever. At the same time, the publication reminds that on average only 20% of sites with pirated content are blocked - the rest of the resources independently delete illegal information.

The bulk of the sites blocked in 2017 (65%) contained illegal video content. Among the films popular with pirates last year were named "Attraction" and "Interview with Putin." At the same time, in 2017, the box office of film distribution increased by 10.9%, to 53.6 billion rubles, and cinema attendance increased by 11.4% - in Roskomnadzor such an increase is associated, among other things, with the blocking of pirated resources.

The Ministry of Culture will regulate the anti-piracy activities of search engines

The Ministry of Culture of Russia published^[31]) amendments to the Law "On Information," which regulate the activities of search engines when issuing links to pirated content. As stated in the explanatory note to the document, now there is no mechanism that would allow copyright holders to contact the search engine with a demand to stop issuing such links. In addition, there is no mechanism for restricting access to anonymous sites, and the search engines themselves, as such, are not legally obliged to stop issuing links to illegal^[32] of the Ministry of^[33].

In this regard, the ministry proposes to oblige search engines to post information on their website to send an application to terminate the issuance of links, as well as to provide for the possibility of sending such an application by filling out an electronic form. It is proposed to oblige the search engine, after receiving the application of the copyright holder, to remove links to pirated resources within 24 hours or send a motivated refusal to the applicant.

Roskomnadzor, in turn, is invited on the basis of a judicial act that has entered into force within three working days to send not only a notification to providers about the adoption of measures to restrict access, but also to notify search engines operators about the obligation to stop issuing links to resources.

The amendments also introduce a mechanism for blocking anonymous sites containing illegally posted content. As explained in the ministry, at present, the vast majority of applications are submitted in relation to sites whose owners cannot be established. Given that it takes 6-8 months to complete the entire judicial procedure to block a pirated site, the copyright holder is not able to reimburse the costs associated with the judicial procedure, as well as recover compensation for violation of rights.

The Ministry of Culture offers Roskomnadzor within 24 hours from the moment of receipt of an application for restricting access to send a request to telecom operators to take measures and notify the owner of an anonymous site and hosting provider of restricting access to such a site. Within ten working days, the owner of such a site can contact the department with a statement about the cancellation of the measures taken.

Search engines began to remove pirated sites from the issuance

Roskomnadzor intends to send requests to search engines demanding that links to forever blocked sites, including torrent trackers, be removed from the issuance. Izvestia writes about this in October with reference to the representative of the department Vadim Ampelonsky.

According to the amendments to the law, which entered into force on October 1, search engines are obliged to remove links to pirated resources and their "mirrors" from the issuance. However, so far, most search engines can still detect, for example, popular torrent trackers such as Rutracker.

Meanwhile, according to the publication, 70% of new users come to such resources using links from search results.

The Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications received the authority to block sites

The State Duma approved in June 2017 in the second reading a bill to block the "mirrors" of pirated sites. The corresponding document is an amendment to the Law "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection" of the^[34]. The bill was originally developed by the Ministry of Communications. In early 2017, it was approved by the Government, after which the document was submitted to the State Duma. In March, the bill was approved by deputies in the first reading.

See more Censorship (control) on the Internet. Experience of Russia

Russia on the US priority list of surveillance in connection with piracy

The trade office USA has published an annual report on the state of intellectual property protection in more than 30 countries around the world. Russia remains on the priority watch list in 2017, the document says. This list includes 11 countries, including also, China Ukraine Kuwait and Chile^[35]

Among the problems that the department highlighted in Russia are copyright infringement, trademark forgery and opaque procedures for organizing collective rights management. The United States is concerned about reports that piracy enforcement continued to decline in 2016, counterfeit trade in goods from abroad is increasing, and Russian law enforcement agencies continue to lack the staff, experience and political leverage to combat intellectual property crimes.

Russia took some positive steps in 2016, but overall the situation remains extremely difficult. The Moscow City Court issued more than 700 preliminary orders against violators. However, insufficient protection of intellectual property rights is an ongoing problem, and the total number of raids, criminal charges and convictions continues to decline.

According to the report, ineffective copyright protection, including on the Internet, remains a serious problem that damages Russian and foreign copyright holders. There are several sites in Russia that contribute to online piracy. The number of illegal copies of films recorded in cinemas increased by 300% in a year.

The country has passed a law that allows copyright holders to go to court, but steps are not taken to find the root of the problem, namely, to file claims against owners of large commercial sites selling pirated materials, including software.

In conclusion, the document says that the United States calls on Russia to develop a more comprehensive, transparent and effective strategy for ensuring compliance with intellectual property rights in order to reduce violations, in particular, the sale of counterfeit goods and piracy of content. The United States will continue to monitor Russia's progress in these areas.

ROCIT: More than 70% of the active Runet community are ready to pay for legal content

Contrary to the opinion that users are not ready to pay for legal content, the ROCIT - Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies study showed that the active Internet community is ready to legally purchase content from copyright holders.

Content is all digital information on the Internet - music, video, texts, photos. There is no official definition of "legal content" as such. We can say that legal is content protected by the copyright holder. Most often, the content creator uses several mechanisms to protect his intellectual work:

• Watermark Image Location (Watermark) - A distinctive sign that is saved when copying an image/photo
• No software copying
• Warning pop-up window, that the content belongs to the copyright holder and, when copying it, must indicate the source/author

In some cases, the author of the content asks to pay for the use of the digital information he personally created. You can buy paid content directly from its owner, or you can use numerous applications or web services that accumulate similar digital content. Music services are the most popular among respondents. More than 60% of respondents listen to music online. Online cinemas are not far behind either. Already 38% of users buy or rent watching movies and TV shows. It is also worth noting that more than 30% of respondents are ready to pay from 100 to 300 rubles per month for content and 8% are ready to give up to 5,000 rubles for using a legal service.

There is certainly a trend towards "eco-friendly" consumption, but this does not stop digital pirates. Pirate resources continue to carry out their illegal activities on the expanses of the Runet. They offer a low-quality service, demonstrating advertising of products and services prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation, such as financial pyramids or casinos.

Still a large number of users continue to consume illegal content without thinking about the negative consequences of such activities. According to a joint study by ROCIT and the Okko online cinema, 20% of respondents use illegal online cinemas for watching videos once a week and more often. A third of the respondents, knowing that advertising on illegal resources brings income that goes to the illegal activities of Internet pirates, continue to use illegal services and this knowledge does not stop them.

Digital pirates literally sell user views to their dishonest advertisers, and are completely uninterested in either the quality of the service or the quality of the content. That is why when watching a video from a pirated resource, advertising is broadcast every 15 minutes, the video audio track does not coincide with the picture or the video simply ends. Client service for pirates simply does not exist, while conscientious and legal resources put at the head of the business - user loyalty and their values.

Copyright holders have become five times more likely to complain about pirated sites

More than 2 thousand applications were sent by copyright holders Roskomnadzor to complaints about 27 thousand pirated sites in 2016. This is five times more appeals than were sent a year earlier, reports in April 2017. ComNews

As a result, the Moscow City Court sent 812 definitions to the regulator, which is four times more than last year. Based on 129 decisions, 213 sites were permanently blocked. Now in the register of prohibited information there are 88.5 thousand resources - this is 30% more than in 2015. More than 26 thousand sites are included in the register of dissemination of extremist information, more than 24 thousand "mirrors" of extremist sites were found.

There is also an increase in the number of users who purchase legal content - from 8 million in 2013 to 22 million in 2016. Online video sales grew by 20% last year, to 4.5 billion rubles.

During the year, Roskomnadzor also plans to introduce software to track illegal content on mobile devices.

Almost 90% of users in Russia do not consider online piracy illegal

87% of Russian consumers surveyed by Irdeto are convinced that the production and distribution of pirated video content is not prohibited by law, and 66% believe that broadcasting and downloading pirated content is also legal. More than half of the respondents (57%) actively consume pirated content themselves. Almost a quarter of such users (22%) view it one or more times a week.

Even after learning that due to video piracy, production studios are losing profits and this affects both the quality and the volume of investments in filming new films and TV series, almost half (48%) of respondents indicated that this fact would not reduce illegal video consumption on their part. As it turned out, only 12% of consumers are ready, in light of the information received, to completely stop viewing pirated content.

As for the most popular pirated content, according to the study, 38% of consumers prefer pirated viewing of films that go to cinemas. In addition, 21% of consumers are most interested in watching pirated versions of television series. Live sports broadcasts, as well as original OTT content from Netflix, Hulu and other providers, are not so popular in Russia - less than 5% of respondents choose in favor of these three categories. As for the methods used to view or access pirated content, the vast majority (75%) of consumers prefer to view pirated content on their laptop or computer, and much less - on a tablet (5%) or smartphone (4% - Android, 1% AppleiOS).

2016

Group-IB: Counterfeit online video market 3.3 billion rubles

In 2016, the counterfeit online video market more than doubled, reaching 3.3 billion rubles. At the same time, the total income of Runet pirates in 2016 is estimated at about 4.3 billion rubles. And the annual losses of the state in the form of lost taxes and fees amount to about 1 billion rubles, Izvestia writes.

As shown by the study "Economics of Pirate Sites - 2016" by Group-IB, suppliers of illegal online video have the highest incomes in this area. If in 2015 they earned 1.5 billion rubles, then in 2016 they already earned twice as much.

The company has compiled a kind of income rating for illegal online cinemas, some of which have already been blocked by the regulator. So, the first place in the list of the most successful pirated resources was taken by Seasonvar.ru. Its attendance reaches 1 million people per day, and income in 2016 amounted to 192.3 million rubles.

In second place is the My-hit.org, whose daily audience is 397 thousand people, and income is 70 million rubles. In third position is the HDrezka.me, now blocked at the request of copyright holders. Its attendance reached 315 thousand people a day, and the income was 69.4 million rubles. This is followed by blocked Kinokrad.co (271 thousand people, 59.7 million rubles) and Baskino.Club (234 thousand people, 41 million rubles).

According to Group-IB estimates, the average online cinema on average earns about 9 million rubles. per year. When considering the sources of profit, it turns out that the main ones are income from subscriptions, advertising and collecting voluntary donations. Over time, pirated resources become more recognizable, adapt to the nuances of legislation and discover new ways to bypass locks, which allows them to flourish. It would be easier to deal with violators if the copyright holders themselves paid more attention to protecting their content, the company said.

EY: The scale of video piracy in Russia

According to EY, the volume of the pirated user home video market in Russia can reach 30-40 billion rubles a year, and the daily audience of illegally video in our country is about 4.5 million people, while legal video - 1.1 million people^[36].

Facebook will introduce a service that will identify copyright holders

A function will appear on Facebook that allows you to identify the authorship of musical works. The service will be similar to the Google Content ID used by YouTube. After the identification is implemented, representatives of record companies will be able to conclude an agreement on the licensing of copyright materials that are posted on the social network. The timing of the introduction of the service and the conclusion of agreements has not yet been announced.

Ministry of Culture proposes to introduce fines for downloading pirated content

The Ministry of Culture of Russia proposes to introduce fines for users for downloading illegal content. This is one of the measures to tighten anti-piracy legislation that the department is working on.

"The Ministry of Culture supports a sharp tightening of anti-piracy legislation, we are developing relevant proposals with the deputies of the State Duma," Minister Vladimir Medinsky quotes RNS. According to him, the topic was discussed at a meeting with State Duma Vice Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy at a meeting of the culture and media committees.

Medinsky believes that it is necessary to significantly tighten anti-piracy legislation, and the introduction of fines for downloading is only one of the ministry's proposals.

"If the tougher version of anti-piracy legislation adopted throughout the civilized world is not adopted and will not be implemented, it will be possible to put an end to the existence of the author, the creator as an institution capable of earning his bread," Medinsky said.

It is supposed to identify the offender who downloaded pirated content, probably by IP address, then he will be notified of the fine. A similar system is already in effect in Germany, and users face fines of up to 1,000 euros for illegal downloading.

"Газета.ру" through the court blocks the site for 15 days for piracy of the article

In July 2016, the Moscow City Court decided to block the story-media.ru portal for a period of 15 days at the request of the online publication "Газета.ру," follows from the documents on the court's website. This is an interim measure to protect the "intellectual rights to a literary work," the decision says. The subject of the dispute is a text called "Baku - the pearl of the Caspian," posted on the story-media.ru. "Газета.ru" considers it a copy of Elizabeth Mayetnaya's article "Zigel-zigel-ai-liu-liu: what to do in Baku" (published in March 2016 on "Газета.ru").

By this time, film and TV series producers continue to use the anti-piracy law most often. Experts interviewed by Vedomosti say that the decision of the Moscow City Court on the lawsuit "Газета.ru" is the first case known to them when the media used anti-piracy law to protect against plagiarism of texts.

Until now, to combat the reprint of full versions of their news, the media used other articles of the Civil Code (GC) - primarily the general article on the protection of exclusive rights to a work (Article 1252).

The anti-piracy law consists of amendments to the articles of the Civil Code (Article 1253.1 on the responsibility of an information intermediary), to the law on information, etc. That is, until now, the media could only demand the removal of copies of the texts and insist on a fine for the offender, as well as monetary compensation, but not blocking the violators.

Although reprinting other people's news texts in whole or in whole paragraphs is a fairly common practice in Runet, the media rarely make claims against violators through the courts. The most famous case of this kind is Vedomosti's lawsuit against RBC in 2006: the newspaper accused the holding of mass copying of texts and demanded to pay 282 million rubles. compensation. The court recognized that RBC illegally used the publications of Vedomosti, but reduced compensation a hundred^[37] for the^[37] time^[37].

Most often, the media in writing require violators to remove illegally reprinted texts and, as a rule, large sites in such a situation eliminate violations, say lawyers of publishing houses interviewed by Vedomosti. Kommersant's chief lawyer Georgy Ivanov and a lawyer for another publication believe that blocking violators in accordance with anti-piracy law can be effective for the media when texts are reprinted by a foreign website or resource whose owners cannot be contacted. Both lawyers are confident that media articles in this situation fully fall under the definition of an original literary work.

2015

"Газета.ру" through the court blocks the site for piracy of infographics

"Газета.ru" applied anti-piracy law to protect the rights to infographics. In September 2015, at the request of this media, the Moscow City Court blocked the go2life.net website, which copied a three-dimensional image from the article "Tanks of the First World War."

The law protects music, books and software

Since May 1, 2015, the "anti-piracy law" has been expanded to music, literary works and software (software).

2013

RF: The law protects video content

In 2013, the so-called "anti-piracy law" came into force, which initially applied only to video content. The law allows copyright holders to seek blocking of pirated sites. In case of repeated copyright infringement, an "eternal blocking" of resources is provided.

2011

Minek presents proposals for digital labels to Volodin

In October 2011, the Ministry of Economic Development presented proposals to the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Vyacheslav Volodin to change copyright in the era of the Internet. His main idea is that by default all copyright holders agree to free use of films and music on the Web for personal purposes. Those who disagree should report this through special digital tags embedded in audio and video files.

Copyright needs to be changed, the authors of the proposals say, since the Internet has changed the economics of intellectual property. In addition to the traditional image-user relations, "information intermediaries" appeared on the Web - telecom operators, Internet portals, etc., providing content delivery from the copyright holder to the user and from one user to another. If earlier the user "passively consumed" music and films created on professional expensive equipment, now he can copy the content himself and post materials on the Web that he does not have rights to. At the same time, the Network gave copyright holders the opportunity to earn money not only on the sale of content, but in other ways, for example, through advertising on sites.

The Ministry of Economic Development proposes the principle "everything that is not prohibited is allowed." By default, it is assumed that all copyright holders agree to use their materials for personal purposes. And those who disagree must notify users of this. The question is how to do it.

Deputy Minister Voskresensky writes a letter to Deputy Chairman Volodin

In February 2011, the Government Council for the Development of Cinematography instructed four ministries - Ministry of Economic Development and Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media MINISTRY OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS the Ministry of Culture - to prepare proposals for ensuring copyright on the Internet. The result of this work was a September letter from Deputy Minister of Economic Development Stanislav Voskresensky to the deputy chairman. Vyacheslav Volodin The author of the letter is closely within the framework of only one. In Russia this document, Voskresensky recalls the cross-border nature Internet and proposes to formulate uniform international rules for copyright on the Web. And make them part of the Berne Convention or other basic interethnic agreements on intellectual property.

In some countries, citizens are persecuted for using pirated content for personal purposes, which was posted on the Web by other people. So, in Russia, the "illegal use of copyright objects" is stated in Art. 146 of the Criminal Code. Voskresensky considers this approach "overly tough." It is difficult for an ordinary Internet user to check the origin of the materials posted on the Web and figure out whether he has the right to use them for personal purposes.

The Ministry of Communications of Russia is already developing the concept of a single platform for digital content. The idea is as follows: all composers, film producers and other copyright holders will submit files with music or videos to a certain nationwide server. There, the file of music or film will be provided with a special digital label by which its use on the Internet can be monitored. And only after that the material will go into circulation. It is assumed that the label will allow you to set the conditions - who and on what equipment will be able to listen to or watch protected recordings and films. And if the copyright holder did not transfer his content to the state server, it means that he does not want to protect his property^[38] the^[38].

Through such tags, representatives of the Ministry of Economic Development propose to regulate access to the creations of copyright holders. Voskresensky proposes to preserve responsibility for illegal posting of content on the Internet. But with two caveats. Firstly, it is necessary to clarify more clearly than today in the laws what "personal use" is, for which there should be no responsibility. Secondly, some market participants - primarily electronic libraries - need to be given the right to freely digitize content without the permission of the copyright holder. But only with the condition that there will be no uncontrolled distribution of content through libraries. As noted in the letter, these proposals were sent to the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Communications and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but these departments have not yet formulated their position.

See also

• Online Video (Global Market)
• Online video (Russian market) Online cinemas
• Copyright on the Internet
• Stop Online Piracy Act
• Software Licensing
• Pirated Software in Russia and the World (Unlicensed Software)
• Computer law
• All-Russian Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
• Blocking sites and applications in Russia
• Intellectual property (patents)

Notes