Pirates multiply links – Newspaper Kommersant No. 9 (7454) of 01/19/2023

Russian media holdings and video services had to fight piracy more actively in 2022 than before: the number of links to illegal copies that they asked to be blocked in search engines increased significantly, as did the number of lawsuits. The growth of piracy is associated primarily with the departure of foreign services and copyright holders from the Russian Federation. But domestic content also suffers, market participants emphasize.

The number of links with content that Russian copyright holders entered into the register as part of the anti-piracy memorandum as of January 2023 exceeded 76.5 million, Yandex told Kommersant. In July 2022, the figure was 62 million links. Thus, in the second half of last year alone, the company blocked 14.5 million links in the search. Previously, the registry has grown so much for several years: from the beginning of the memorandum in 2018 until March 2021, the company added 15 million links to the registry. The memorandum was signed by copyright holders and search engines and obliges the latter to remove links to pirated resources from search results out of court.

Gazprom Media Holding (GPMKH, includes NTV, TNT, TV-3, Pyatnitsa!, etc.) in 2022 initiated the blocking and removal of more than 7 million links to pirated copies of content on the Internet, which is 67% more than than in 2021, Kommersant was confirmed in the holding. Including 4.6 million links were removed from the issuance of Yandex at his request (in 2021 – 2.6 million), from the issuance of Google – 2.8 million (in 2021 – 0.9 million), clarified in the GPMC . Among the projects that are most popular with pirates are Comedy Club (TNT), Investigation Veli (NTV) and the Italian Football Championship (Match TV).

The number of lawsuits related to pirated content has also grown: in 2022, GPMC initiated 854 lawsuits, which received decisions for the payment of 8.7 million rubles, which is 30% more than the total for the previous four years.

The All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company declined to comment, and the National Media Group did not respond to a request.

Since March 2022, the audience as a whole has been turning to pirated resources more often, Anton Volodkin, Wink video service development director, says: “It is difficult to estimate the exact volume, but, according to our estimates, traffic to such resources has doubled compared to 2021.” The growth of piracy, in his opinion, is primarily due to the departure of a number of foreign services and copyright holders from the Russian market: “The main demand and supply fell on their content, while Russian original content suffered to a lesser extent.” After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures and Universal Pictures, Netflix and many others left the Russian Federation.

Pirate services began to flourish, having received “exclusive” content, for example, the same Netflix, says Sofya Mitrofanova, CEO of Premier. But Russian projects are also suffering from the growth in the activity of illegal resources, she believes: “Piracy has affected our top projects. In 2022, we removed the largest number of links from Survival Game-2, Epidemic-2, Restaurant by Concepts, Dropper.

An increase in the number of links does not yet mean that there are more pirates, Sergei Vasilenko, head of the anti-piracy department of the Start online cinema, clarifies: “Several pages with different url addresses are created daily for one movie or series on one site. This solves the problem of removing links from the SERP for the webmaster, and also has a better effect on search engine rankings. That is, relatively speaking, there will be more links on one site tomorrow than today, but it is still the same resource administrator, that is, the same pirate.

The number of lawsuits to block pirated content increased in 2022 and will continue to grow in 2023, lawyers say. But the practice of protecting content in court has not changed, says Sergey Zuykov, a partner at Zuykov & Partners: “It’s just that there are a lot more violations, since pirates place both Russian and foreign content on the network, which copyright holders have to fight against.”

Valeria Lebedeva