Original Russian TV series are in great demand among pirates

Russian media holdings and video services in 2023 are faced with increased pressure from pirates, whose attention is increasingly spreading not only to the products of foreign rights holders who have left the country, but also to original Russian films and TV series. Market participants note that the interest of pirates is fueled by “the excitement of the audience before the upcoming premieres.” Against this background, legislators are trying for their part to strengthen the fight against piracy.

The number of links with content that Russian copyright holders entered into the register as part of the anti-piracy memorandum at the end of 2023 exceeded 89 million, Yandex told Kommersant. In January 2022, the figure was 76.5 million links (see “Kommersant” dated January 19, 2023).

Search engines (Yandex, Mail.ru and Rambler) and copyright holders in the Russian Federation (primarily video content producers) signed an anti-piracy memorandum on November 1, 2018. It obliges Internet platforms to remove links to pirated resources from search results out of court. In September 2023, Roskomnadzor announced the inclusion of the book and music industries in the memorandum. But publishers “do not use it technically yet,” Maxim Ryabyko, a member of the board of the Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (unites Alpina Digital, Azbuka-Atticus, Eksmo-AST), clarified to Kommersant. He clarified that the piracy level can be kept at 2–3%.

As a Kommersant source familiar with the situation explains, as a rule, building direct interaction with search engines “takes time,” so representatives of the book and music industry connected to the memorandum cannot yet take full advantage of it. It follows from the signed memorandum that the determination of the conditions and procedure for copyright holders to contact search engines is carried out during a transition period, which lasts up to six months.

At the same time, the experience of video content producers shows that the memorandum works. Thus, “Gazprom-Media Holding” (GPMH, includes NTV, TNT, TV-3, “Friday!”, etc.) in 2023 initiated the blocking and deletion of more than 8.5 million links, which is 19.3% more, than in 2022. The number of blocked sites with GPMH content increased year on year by 8.5%, to 16 thousand, said Pavel Rusakov, head of the intellectual property protection department at GPM Digital Innovations. Including, 5.5 million links were removed from Yandex search results at the company’s request, and 4.1 million from Google search results. In the courts, GPMH initiated 923 lawsuits during the year (according to the holding, this is 44.4% of all claims in Russia on the protection of copyright and related rights on the Internet).

“National Media Group” at the end of 2023 increased the number of requests to block pirated content, the holding noted: “The increase is due to the growing popularity of our original titles (names.— “Kommersant”)”. The company did not disclose absolute figures. VGTRK did not respond to the request.

Start for 2023 identified more than 700 thousand pirated links on the Internet and more than 130 thousand links in social networks, says Sergei Vasilenko, head of the anti-piracy department of the online cinema. This, he said, is almost twice as much as in 2022. He attributes the growth of unlicensed content on the Internet not only to the departure of Western majors (Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures and Universal Pictures), but also to interest in Russian original projects. “The more the audience’s interest in the upcoming premiere is heightened, the more actively pirates “hunt” for the content,” explained Mr. Vasilenko. “More than 21 thousand links were removed from the hit “The Boy’s Word,” 90% of them in Telegram.” Okko also notes the pirates’ focus on the platform’s original series. Over the course of a year, 1.5 million links were blocked there. Kion did not disclose the number of deleted links, noting only an increase in the indicator.

The speed of the fight against pirates may further increase if a new legislative initiative of a group of deputies led by the head of the information policy committee Alexander Khinshtein is implemented (see Kommersant-Online) – on January 25, they introduced a bill to the State Duma that proposes to transfer powers to block “mirrors” » illegal sites from the Ministry of Digital Development, which conducts the examination, directly to Roskomnadzor.

Yulia Yurasova