Recently, the largest companies creating and distributing content in Russia have demanded that Yandex remove from the search output links to pirated resources. The letter itself was addressed to the general director of the Yandex group of companies, Arkady Volozh,
write Vedomosti.
The document was signed by several people, among them - General Director of the National Federation of the Music Industry Leonid Agronov, CEO of the Internet Video Association Alexei Byrdin, Chairman of the Association of Film and Television Producers Sergey Selyanov and President of the Media-Communication Union Pavel Stepanov. According to the authors of the letter, Yandex, without deleting links to pirated websites, in one way or another contributes to the growth of piracy in the country.
And piracy, in turn, inflicts significant losses on Russian companies. “We urge Yandex to use all available methods to detect illegal content and eliminate it from both search results and Yandex’s applications and services,” the letter says.
The search engine received a proposal to develop and sign a memorandum on the inadmissibility of the distribution of illegal resources. All producers and distributors of Russian content, as well as copyright holders and search engines available in runet will be attracted to the signing of the memorandum. A similar letter will be sent to Google, it will happen soon.
Currently, according to SimilarWeb, about 80% of the traffic of pirated sites reach these sites from search. If we take Yandex as an example, its share is about 78% for the ten largest illegal resources.
The authors of the letter report that Yandex quite often shows illegal resources in search results, and we are talking about fairly high positions of such sites. In the opinion of the right holders, the funds that “could be reinvested in the industry through the distribution of legal content” go to illegal distributors using the various possibilities of Yandex. Among others - advertising promotion of the search engine as a tool for accessing illegal content.
In addition, Yandex.Video demonstrates players to users from blocked illegal resources. Mirrors of the blocked sites quickly appear in the top search results.
The appeal of the copyright holders states that the search engine practices the removal of pirated links from the search results, however, this applies only to the United States. In other jurisdictions, Yandex deletes links to illegal content as required by the copyright holders.
According to representatives of the search engine, the company works in full compliance with the current legislation in all countries of presence. “Video recordings are posted on third-party sites and are played in the player from these sites, and the search engine only shows links to these videos. If the video is deleted from the source site, the link to this video will not be displayed in the Yandex search, the company’s response says.
In Russia, about the same pirate content works about the same scheme, it was first applied in 2013. According to the provisions of the law, if the right holder wishes to block access to illegal content, he must apply to the Moscow City Court. If the latter makes a positive decision, Roskomnadzor notifies the site. If this resource does not remove the disputed content, then the service gives an order to the providers to block the resource. If the right holder succeeds in proving a systematic violation of the law by one or another resource, the court decides on its “perpetual blockage”.
The system works in a fairly operational mode, but the problem is that if one resource is blocked, then the pirates immediately create its mirror. Since October 1 of last year, the right holders achieved the possibility of blocking and “mirrors” - and in just one day. To perform this operation, neither a court decision nor a notification of the resource itself is required.
As for the “perpetual blocking”, this system has been working since 2015. According to it, after repeated violation of the anti-piracy law, sites can be blocked forever. By the end of last year, about 300 pirate websites, which soon acquired about 2500 mirrors, fell into perpetual blocking in the Russian Federation.