In 2022, the fight against piracy intensified

The number of links that Russian copyright holders entered into the registry as part of the anti-piracy memorandum as of January 2023 exceeded 76.5 million, according to Yandex. 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. In July 2022, the registry contained 62 million links. Thus, in the second half of 2022, the company blocked 14.5 million links in the search - almost the same number was added from the beginning of the memorandum in 2018 to March 2021.

The number of lawsuits related to pirated content has also grown: for example, in 2022, Gazprom-Media-Holding initiated 854 lawsuits, and decisions were received on them for the payment of 8.7 million rubles, which is 30% more than in total for the previous four years.

According to Anton Volodkin, director of development at the Wink video service, the growth in piracy is primarily due to the departure of a number of foreign services and copyright holders from the Russian market. After the outbreak of military actions in Ukraine, Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures and Universal Pictures, Netflix left Russia. Sofia Mitrofanova, General Director of Premier video service, notes that Russian projects are also suffering from the growth in the activity of illegal resources: “In 2022, we removed the largest number of links from Game for Survival-2, Epidemic-2, and other top projects".

The number of lawsuits for blocking pirated content increased in 2022 and will continue to grow in 2023. But the practice of protecting content in court has not changed, says Sergey Zuykov, partner of Zuykov and partners: "There are simply much more violations, since pirates place both Russian and foreign content on the network at the same time, which copyright holders have to fight."

Source: Kommersant Publishing House