The key strength of the legislation is that provides a mechanism for sites to be blocked should they not comply with rightsholder takedown requests within 72 hours.

This element of the framework caused widespread fear and speculation. Would thousands of sites, some carrying legitimate content, find themselves censored at the hands of over-broad legislation tipped heavily in favor of “corporate interests”?

Frankly, no.

Concern that rightsholders would stampede to court to quickly wipe out as many sites as possible proved unfounded. Out of 19 complaints filed in the first three weeks of the law, just 11 were correctly presented and processed. Torrent site Rutor.org was one of the earliest casualties.

After five months in action, rightsholders had filed around 75 official complaints. In 30 cases the targeted sites complied with official removal orders and in 19 others a decision was taken by the authorities to block offending URLs.

Then, just six months later, Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov announced that the law was having the required effect.

“The law has actually brought us serious results,” he said.

“We found that [the law's introduction] resulted in an increase of 30% in the number of people who pay for legal content. This is a major achievement. Our country plans to increase the number of consumers of legal content on the Internet to 30 million people by 2018.”

Critics remain doubtful of the dramatic turnaround and throughout the year there has been little downturn in the number of rightsholders complaining about piracy. Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the new law’s introduction and it’s fair to say there were no festivities.

According to figures obtained by Izvestia from telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor, during the past year the Moscow City Court imposed preliminary interim measures against 175 sites following copyright complaints.

The Court went on to block a total of 12 file-sharing related domains, most of them BitTorrent trackers. This number is far below the numbers predicted one year ago.

Perhaps unsurprisingly a far greater number of IP addresses were eventually blocked, 99 in total.

“This is due to the fact that the sites tried to avoid blocking by migrating to other IP-addresses that Roscomnadzor also monitors and places on the registry,” a spokesman said.

But despite all the complaints and blocking, pirated content is still easy to find, a key issue that doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon. Nevertheless, the watchdog says that things are improving.

“If you want to find illegal content on the web, you still can today. But rightsholders now have the opportunity to make an impact on legal grounds, which is most critical for them in terms of the spread of pirated content. They are also beginning to unite to close pirated resources for longer,” the spokesman said.

Furthermore, fears expressed by search engines that the law would negatively impact the web have not come to pass.

“As for the dissatisfaction shown by Internet companies following the entry into force of the law, neither Google, Mail.ru, or Yandex has suffered from it. Many areas, where earlier there was illegal content, are now beginning to build into legitimate businesses.”

But despite positivity from the watchdog, critics remain.

“If you want to download any movie and can spend five minutes and still download it, then the law has brought no benefits,” Wikimedia executive director Stanislav Kozlovsky told Izvestia.

“Also remaining are the problems caused by the very principle of blocking IP-addresses. If a pirate site is suddenly blocked, it costs nothing to move to a different address. This problem is solved in just a day.”

Only time will tell if Russia’s legislative moves will pay off in the end, but if the first 12 months are anything to go by, they will have to wait considerably longer yet.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

On August 1, 2013, a new law was passed which would allow sites to be blocked at the ISP level if they failed to respond to copyright infringement complaints in a timely fashion. But despite the legislative teeth, file-sharing sites were not blocked, with many simply complying with takedown demands as required by law.

In January 2014, however, the government said that the law was actually having the required effect, with the number of Internet users purchasing legal content going up by 30%. But at the same time there were complaints.

The founder of IVI.ru, the country’s leading source of Hollywood-licensed video, said that his company had not benefited from the law. And now it seems that the law’s lack of success is being admitted be people right at the top – the very, very top.

During a meeting with members of the House of the Federation Council, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the legislation introduced in August 2013 had failed to meet its objectives.

“This is an extremely important area, and we still have very much to do here,” he told the meeting.

“Even after we have adopted these solutions for intellectual property protection in the field of cinema, recent analysis has shown that it does not work as effectively as we expected.”

Putin added that despite the new law, pirate movies can appear on websites anywhere and completely undermine the framework.

“The effect is that all of our protection is reduced to zero,” the President said.

But even though things aren’t working, there are no signs of any retreat. Instead the Russian government is looking to get even more aggressive.

“It is necessary to consider additional steps to protect intellectual property rights,” Putin concluded.

Work is already underway to expand the current legislation to encompass all content since right now only video is protected. The government is also looking at introducing fines for errant hosting providers and wants to find a way to permanently close sites persistently engaging in piracy.

“Sites engaging in piracy professionally (it’s their business) should be closed,” said Vladimir Medina of the Ministry of Culture.

But the idea that closing sites will solve the problem was dismissed by a representative from the body in control of .ru domains. Noting that she is reminded of the “Streisand Effect”, where suppressed information only leads to wider dissemination, Olga Alexandrova-Massine said people will find a way to access blocked content.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The new law, dubbed ‘Russian SOPA’, allowed copyright holders to issue complaints against sites that fail to properly comply with copyright notices, with the ultimate sanction of having their domains blocked at the ISP level.

While the new law has reportedly encouraged a wide range of sites to focus on complying with takedown requests, a copyright case just concluded in the Moscow Arbitration Court will be of significant concern to site owners across the country.

At the center of the lawsuit was a site called TracksFlow, a professional looking Spotify-like music streaming service with one notable difference – it is completely free of charge.

With a decent database of music the site inevitably attracted the attention of copyright holders. According to TracksFlow founder Boris Golikov, Warner Music subsidiary S.B.A. Music Publishing contacted him during 2013 to complain that their music was being offered via his site without permission.

Since TracksFlow is only an index, no actual content could be removed, Golikov told the label.

“We talked and I explained that there are no files and we do not store any on the site, it’s only a kind of aggregator, a music search engine,” Golikov explained.

In response, the label filed a lawsuit in which they complained that TracksFlow was offering music from their 30-year-old singer MakSim without permission. Neither Golikov nor associated company Digital Lab were notified of the case.

Now the Moscow Arbitration Court has handed down its ruling, finding the defendants guilty of copyright infringement and ordering them to pay a total of 1,550,000 rubles ($44,300) in compensation. While these fines are fairly small by modern standards the Court also ordered the termination of the TracksFlow.com domain name, a first-of-its-kind action by a Russian court.

“It was possible to prove that the resource is absolutely pirate in character,” said Leonid Agronov, CEO of the National Federation of the Music Industry. The likelihood of achieving similar results in other cases has now increased, Agronov added.

The big question now, however, surrounds the process which will lead to the loss of TracksFlow’s domain. TracksFlow.com is currently registered with United States company Name.com, so aside from a supporting ruling overseas it is not clear how Russian authorities intend to take control of it. Golikov could hand it over of course, but it appears he is ready to fight the decision.

Speaking with Vedomosti, Golikov reiterated that he was never made aware of the proceedings against him and as such will appeal against the ruling.

“Naturally, as soon as I get access to the documents I will file an appeal,” he said.

According to the Moscow Arbitration Court, he has 30 days to do so.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At the same time, the 29-year-old is caught up in one of the first cases under Russia’s new anti-piracy law.

In Russia copyright holders have targeted several websites, including the popular Rutor.org, which stand accused of distributing their content without permission.

The authorities found out out that Svartholm’s name appeared as the domain registrant for two of the sites, Rutor.org and Kinozal.tv. In addition, PRQ, the hosting company founded by the Pirate Bay founder, was listed as the registrant organization.

Last November, Svartholm was ordered to stop the distribution of these copyrighted works by changing the domain name information, and pay the fees for the publication of the verdict.

While it’s unclear whether Russia made any attempts to reach out to the Pirate Bay founder, a friend and former colleague at PRQ tells TorrentFreak that Svartholm can’t help them, even if he wanted to.

Andreas Carsbring says that PRQ offered customers the option to use the hosting company’s contact details, as a privacy shield. However, the client would have full control over the domain and bear the legal responsibilities, as defined in their contract.

“The service we offered at PRQ was to register the domain names as ‘Customer of PRQ’, so the domain still belongs legally to the customer even though the contact details for PRQ are being used,” Carsbring says.

There are additional signs that in the case of Rutor, the people behind the site filled out Svartholm’s name themselves, as it’s misspelled.

“In this particular case with Rutor.org it appears that the customer has registered the domain themselves using PRQ’s information, and by mistake they misspelled his last name. That might also explain why it says PRQ Inet KB, and not Customer of PRQ Inet KB as is the standard procedure.”

Even if PRQ were legally responsible there isn’t much Svartholm can do as he sold the company years ago before he left for Cambodia. In other words, Svartholm can’t help Russia in the case, even if he wanted to.

That someone else than the Pirate Bay founder has control over the domains is backed up by a recent Whois change for the Kinozal.tv. The domain no longer lists Svartholm as the contact person, a change the Pirate Bay founder himself could not have made from prison.

Carsbring, who recently launched the free.anakata.info website, believes that Svartholm may not even know about the Russian case. He hopes that the Rutor people will remove Svartholm’s name to avoid more trouble.

“I’m not sure if he’s aware of it. I’ll try to get this information through to him as soon as possible and see what he says. Hopefully the people behind Rutor.org can sort this out with PRQ Inet and update the registry to remove his name since it shouldn’t be there since years ago,” he says.

Meanwhile, Gottfrid has enough other things to worry about. The Pirate Bay founder remains in prison for now as a Danish court recently extended his custody until February 5.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, there are other censorship mechanisms coming to the forefront. Developments in Italy mean that from April blockades against file-sharing sites will be initiated without the need for a court order, a worrying development and a slap in the face for due process.

In addition to the common High Court injunction, in the UK there is now ‘voluntary’ site blocking being carried out by ISPs in the form of parental controls that are activated by default. They have already caused outrage by blocking children’s anti-abuse charities and are bound to cause even more trouble during the new year.

Once the site blocking genie was let out of the bottle it was only a matter of time as to when it would cause a proper disaster. Worryingly, a new announcement coming out of Russia is an indicator of what kind of damage could be caused if the wrong people are given access to the website kill-switch.

Telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor is the body responsible for maintaining Russia’s Internet blacklist. Sites can be placed on the blacklist for any number of reasons, from promoting drugs, crime and suicide, to failing to respond to rightholders complaints under the anti-piracy legislation passed earlier this year.

There are already tens of thousands of sites (including file-sharing portals) already on the list but if Roskomnadzor carries through on its latest threats the situation could quickly accelerate out of all proportion.

The problem, the watchdog says, is being caused by foreign hosts and service providers, mainly in the United States, who are refusing to disable access to a range of ‘illegal’ material when Russian authorities ask. The sites they host apparently “hop around” from location to location, but within the same provider, testing Roskomnadzor’s patience.

“We have serious questions about a particular group of providers offering such sites hosting services. We ask them to block content, but they refuse to cooperate with us,” says spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky.

As a result Roskomnadzor says it is considering blocking a range of overseas hosts for failing to comply. They include Ukrainian host Vedekon.ua, Endurance International (US), Hostnoc (US), DataShack (US), Infinitie (US), and the torrent and file-sharing friendly OVH (France) and Voxility (Romania).

While blocking these entire hosts would be a drastic move, when one examines the other sites on the regulator’s list one sees how things could get a whole lot worse.

Stop-ddos.net, staminus.net and incapsula.com are all US-based content-agnostic services that provide websites with DDoS and other security-related protection. Even though they clearly do not provide any illegal content, they are being held responsible for the activities of their customers.

And, as if it couldn’t get any worse, rounding off the Russian list is CloudFlare, a US-based CDN company that assists many hundreds of thousands of sites worldwide. Back in March, CloudFlare experienced technical difficulties which resulted in 750,000 sites being taken offline. If the Russian’s block CloudFlare, similar numbers of sites would be rendered locally inaccessible.

Whether Roskomnadzor carries through with its threats remains to be seen, but even putting the majority of these companies on its list shows that collateral damage is hardly a major concern of theirs.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As if that’s not enough trouble, Svartholm has now been dragged into a prominent Russian piracy case.

The case in question is one of the first under Russia’s new anti-piracy law and was initiated by several major media companies including Gazprom Media, Non-Stop Production and Star Media.

The copyright holders have targeted several websites, including the popular Rutor.org, which are accused of distributing their content without permission. The list of pirated titles includes the movies Stalingrad and Legend 17 as well as the TV series Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire.

While Svartholm is not believed to be directly involved in the case, his name appeared as the domain name registrant for Rutor.org and Kinozal.tv. In addition, PRQ, the hosting company created by the Pirate Bay founder, is listed as the registrant organization.

Following a verdict released by Moscow City Court this week, Svartholm is now being held responsible for the copyright infringements that take place though these two sites.

The court has therefore ordered him to stop the distribution of these copyrighted works by changing the domain name information, and pay the fees for the publication of the verdict.

Commenting on the case, a representative for the plaintiffs says that copyright holders “do not care who the ultimate owner of the site is,” as long as the infringing material is rendered unavailable.

Russia’s new anti-piracy law can be used to block IP-addresses or make domains unavailable. This effectively means that domain registrars and hosting companies can be held liable for the infringing actions of their clients.

It is unknown to what extent the court has researched whether Svartholm still has control over the domain name information or how he is supposed to comply with the ruling during his incarceration.

If the authorities plan to bring Svartholm to justice on their home turf should he fail to take action, they will have to get in line behind Denmark.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The DMCA has a strict set of rules that defines how copyright holders and content providers should deal with pirated content. This works well as long as all parties play by the rules, which is unfortunately not always the case.

The entertainment industries in particular often complain about foreign sites that ignore their takedown requests. While the DMCA provides no remedy against this negligence, a new notice and takedown procedure introduced in Italy will.

AGCOM, Italy’s independent Electronic Communications Authority, has drafted a new regulation that will allow it to order a seizure or ISP blockade of any website that fails to promptly remove copyright infringing content, without a court order.

Under the new rules websites and ISPs will have a 72-hour window to process takedown notices. If they don’t respond appropriately within that time-frame AGCOM will take action. The new regulation is scheduled to be implemented early next year and is currently under review by the European Commission.

The proposal, which shows similarities with SOPA and new anti-piracy legislation in Russia, is meeting resistance from various sides including consumer groups, lawyers, scholars and Internet providers who have launched a petition to curb the plans.

One of the complaints is that the current draft lacks due process, as AGCOM will decide whether a site should be blocked without a court order.

“AGCOM has introduced these rules through an administrative process, without hearing the Italian Parliament and without oversight by a court, as is the case in all other countries,” Fulvio Sarzana, a lawyer with the Sarzana and Partners law firm specializing in Internet and copyright disputes, tells TorrentFreak.

“Websites and ISPs have three days to remove the infringing works or disable access to such content. If they fail to do so AGCOM gives an order to take down the entire site or to prevent access through the IP-address blocking,” Sarzana adds.

Another element of the new regulation causesing concern is that AGCOM can compel local and foreign Internet providers to hand over the personal details of site owners, again without judicial oversight. The telecoms regulator can then share these details with copyright holders who may want to take legal action.

The rightsholders don’t see any problems and welcome the new proposals, as it will help them to deal with rogue pirate sites more efficiently.

“We believe this regulation will improve the anti piracy efforts and speed up enforcement,” Enzo Mazza, president of Italian anti-piracy group FIMI, tells TorrentFreak.

“Traditionally criminal cases are used to block sites, but this fast track will add value to our efforts. Similar regulations are already applied in the area of online gambling and antitrust, where the authorities can block sites with an administrative order,” Mazza adds.

The European Commission is still reviewing AGCOM’s proposal and is expected to hand down a decision by the end of November.

For the time being sites can only be blocked through court orders, which is standard procedure in Italy now. More than a dozen larger torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay and Kickass.to are already blocked, and last week Torrentcrazy.com and Sumotorrent.sx were added to the growing list.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The system, dubbed Russia’s SOPA, forces sites to comply with copyright complaints in a swift manner or face their domains being added to a national blacklist. Being added to that register is a serious business, since all local ISPs are expected to blacklist corresponding IP addresses so that local Internet users cannot gain access.

Proposals put forward last month upped the ante again, with any service provider or search engine not blocking sites on the blacklist potentially facing fines of around $30,000.

But according to comments coming out of the Government yesterday, Russia appears to be taking its anti-piracy initiative to the next level and beyond, fully living up to its ‘SOPA’ billing.

Ministry of Communications deputy head Alexei Volin said that Russia now intends to compartmentalize sites that are dedicated to piracy. They will be treated completely differently from other sites, such as YouTube etc, who may have an infringement problem but respond to copyright holders positively.

“There are a conscientious and diligent owners of websites, to which some people upload illegal or dangerous content. When it comes to this sort of thing, we order blocks of URLs and individual pages,” Volin said.

“However, there are some specialized and entirely pornographic sites that are entirely blocked by IP address. The same principle will be observed in respect of torrents and sites engaged in outright piracy,” the minister added.

“We will not block them for some particular things, we’ll close them entirely by IP address,” Volin said.

According to the minister there are around 160 local sites, ten of them very popular, that are causing serious concerns for the entertainment industries. Dealing with these, he says, can be a positive for the economy.

“There are [around 8 million] people who pay money for the legal content that they get on the Internet. These are the users who are one of the growth drivers of the Internet economy,” Volin said, adding that even pirates will spend when the circumstances are right.

“People on the Internet are willing to pay, especially when the content is useful, available and at a fair price,” he concludes.

Right at this moment it is unclear how the system will be implemented and on what basis. Presumably some kind of ‘pirate’ list already exists but whether sites will be blocked without further discussion or will have to fall foul of future complaints is not known.

Whatever the outcome, sites like RuTracker.org will probably be a priority target, despite claims from the site’s operators that they comply with takedown requests.

The site has around 13.4 million registered users, 3.5 million of them active in the past year. It hosts close to 1.5 million torrent files and is currently the 14th most-popular site in Russia. It’s proven resilient so far and last month celebrated its 9th birthday, but only time will tell what the future holds.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At the moment, copyright complaints against a site can lead to that domain being added to a national blocklist if its operator fails to render copyright movies and TV shows inaccessible. As reported earlier this month, moves are now underway to expand the law to cover music and other digital content.

Yesterday on the first day of the fall session the State Duma adopted the first reading of amendments that will see “information intermediaries” fined for failing to remove content or links to content reported as infringing by copyright holders. On the back of this success, rightsholders are now hoping to take things to a whole new level.

According to information obtained by Vedomosti, publishers of music, books and software have put forward amendments which will place a huge burden of responsibility not just on regular websites but also on search engines such as Google and local outfit Yandex.

The proposed amendments center around the creation of a national registry listing all music, software and books. This database will then be made available to search engines and site owners who will be required to consult it before servicing their users with links or content.

For example, if a user searches for a particular song using Google, in the background the search engine would be required to carry out a search on the national database to see if the song is listed. If the track is present then Google would be obliged to list official sources for the content in the first pages of results while automatically relegating other sites.

In addition, rightsholders are asking that when sites are placed on the current national blacklist for non-compliance with copyright takedowns, search engines should remove them completely from search results sent to users.

Commenting on the proposals, a Google spokesperson said that “pre-moderation” of content would be damaging to the Internet industry.

“The company can not take on the role of the courts to determine whether someone’s rights have been violated. A proposal to artificially rank links in search results does not take into account the technical characteristics of search engines and would lower the quality of the search,” he said.

Yandex are equally unimpressed, noting that the amendments are a blunt instrument that do not take into consideration the nuances of search engine operation or copyright law.

“It is impossible to rank sites with an eye on a register of legal resources,” a spokesperson told Vedomosti.

“First, in itself the assignment of resources to legal or illegal is extremely controversial. Secondly, items affected by copyright and related rights can be used in some circumstances without gaining permission from copyright holders, there is a wide range of exceptions. For example, if you thoroughly follow the amendments, a search engine will not be able to provide links to works containing the quotes that users type into the query string.”

Taken to conclusion, the proposals could have a seriously chilling effect on the real-time nature of the Internet.

“[If the amendments go through], rightsholders will switch the entire Internet into pre-moderation mode, because sites can not accommodate any comment without full verification of all the materials located on the link in this comment. For the bulk of services, this task is impossible,” Yandex concludes.

Rightsholders in the United States and Europe have been pushing Google to downgrade pirate sites in search results while promoting sites offering legitimate content. Last year Google began demoting some sites in its listings and is now offering its advice to rightsholders so that they can SEO their way to the front page. In Russia, rightsholders appear to want the law to do that for them.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Copyright complaints against a site or service can lead to that domain being added to a national blocklist, if their operators fail to render the illicit content inaccessible within a few days.

Although rightsholders have struggled at times to provide the necessary information required for a correctly formatted complaint, orders have already been issued to add sites to the Russian national blocklist. But now, just 34 days after the initial law was implemented, the government is pushing through further punitive measures for pirates and those deemed to be assisting them.

According to Vesti.ru a parliamentary committee approved a new bill yesterday which will allow a range of Internet entities to be fined if they fail to block content and sites as dictated by the country’s blacklist.

The bill, which was approved in the first of three planned readings in the State Duma, introduces fines of up to one million rubles ($29,853) to be levied against search engines, web hosts, ISPs, and even regular web users.

The heaviest of fines will be reserved for companies failing to comply with the requirements of the blacklist, while punishments for regular users are expected to sit around 5,000 rubles ($149).

Last week, Russian authorities ordered the blocking of Rutor, one of the largest Russian torrent sites. At the moment the site is not on the national blacklist and remains available via ISPs but unless the site complies with a previous order it’s IP address will soon be blocked.

Later in the year, possibly in the fall, Russia will seek to expand the current law. At the moment only TV shows and movies are protected by the legislation but music, books and other works are expected to be added.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.