The legislation provides a mechanism for sites to be blocked should they not comply with rightsholder takedown requests within 72 hours.

The ultimate sanction was applied in a limited number of cases during the first year leaving rightsholders with many complaints, not least that the law only applies to movies and TV shows.

For months the authorities have been investigated ways to boost the legislation and in early July a set of amendments were passed following their second reading. They are currently being considered by the lower house of parliament, the State Duma.

According to Deputy Duma Speaker Sergei Zhelezniak, it is likely they will return for a further reading during the fall, this time containing provisions for the protection of music, books and software.

“Most likely, we will table amendments at the beginning of the autumn session,” Zhelezniak told a meeting of the copyright protection working group.

Zhelezniak says that legislators have carefully studied the proposals of the executive authorities and generally agreed that there should be tightened penalties for owners of Internet sites which intentionally engage in piracy. These sites will be blocked by court order and placed in a “special register”.

Ministry of Culture State Secretary Grigory Ivliev says that the government wants to increase the level of fines levied against those who engage in the piracy of music, books and software. For businesses fines could be increased to around one million rubles ($26,600) while individuals could face fines up to 300,000 rubles ($8,300)

If all goes to plan, the new amendments could in force as early as this December.

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

In several Special 301 Reports published by the United States Trade Representative, Russia’s Facebook equivalent has been criticized for the huge quantities of unauthorized media it hosts. As a result it is currently labeled a “notorious market”, a term usually reserved for piracy’s apparent worst-of-the-worst.

In common with many user-generated sites, VK allows its millions of users to upload anything from movies and TV shows to their entire music collections. Unlike Facebook and other major players, Russia’s social network has been very slow to adopt anti-piracy measures.

Three major record labels – Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music – have now taken their concerns to the Saint Petersburg & Leningradsky Region Arbitration Court. The labels accuse VK of running a service that facilitates large-scale copyright infringement and are demanding countermeasures and compensation.

The record labels have asked for an order requiring VK to implement fingerprinting technology to delete copyrighted works and prevent them from being re-uploaded. In addition, Sony, Warner and Universal are demanding 50 million rubles ($1.4 million) from the social networking site to compensate for losses suffered.

“VK’s music service, unlike others in Russia, is an unlicensed file-sharing service that is designed for copyright infringement on a large-scale,” IFPI’s Frances Moore says in a comment.

“We have repeatedly highlighted this problem over a long period of time. We have encouraged VK to cease its infringements and negotiate with record companies to become a licensed service. To date the company has taken no meaningful steps to tackle the problem, so today legal proceedings are being commenced,” Moore adds.

VK has yet to respond to the accusations. Russia’s telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor previously said that VK was trying very hard to better their anti-piracy practices, but these efforts apparently came too late.

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

The company, whose products are installed on millions of devices around the world, added a new feature to its anti-virus suite which can block copyright-infringing content.

The new feature, which is included in the latest release of Dr.Web 9.0, is the first of its kind. Unlike other blocklists Dr. Web’s database of pirate URLs is built based on reports from copyright holders.

Rightsholders can submit “takedown” notices to the antivirus vendor, who will then block access to the URLs if the copyright claim holds up. TorrentFreak talked to Dr. Web CEO Boris Sharov who sees the new feature as a natural extension of anti-virus products.

“Antivirus products have a built-in web-filtering system, therefore it’s no problem to block URLs. In the parental control module many malicious URLs have already been blocked for years,” Sharov tells TF.

According to the CEO, the purpose of the new feature is to not only prevent piracy, but also to minimize security risks for users.

“Copyright protection is not just about blocking some URLs. In fact, the new feature is completely in the line of our main functionality – we warn users about possible fraud when they access a copyright-infringing site.”

The company explains that the public is sometimes unable to distinguish infringing files from legal ones, which can lead to all sorts of problems.

“It is both anti-phishing and anti-malware protection – we let people know that someone is going to fool them,” Sharov tells us.

Several copyright holders have submitted takedown requests to Dr. Web recently, and more are expected to follow in the near future. However, the anti-virus company says that it isn’t necessarily out to block all pirated content.

“We have just launched the service and there are some copyright holders who have already asked us to include URLs that are infringing on their copyrights,” Sharov says.

“It’s not our goal to include as many URLs in the database as possible. We just want copyright holders to know that there is a service for them in Dr.Web products,” he adds.

Dr. Web stresses that it will only add URLs to the database upon request from copyright holders. The company won’t use algorithms to detect and block infringing content, such as McAfee recently suggested.

Copyright holders who are interested in the feature can file requests on Dr. Web’s Brand Protection page. Users of the software who prefer an unfiltered web have the option to disable the feature at their own risk.

Whether other anti-virus vendors will follow Dr. Web’s example has yet to be seen.

_{Photo: Dan Zen}

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.

New figures released by the authorities reveal that after more than five months in action, rightholders filed around 75 official complaints. In 30 of those cases the sites in question complied with official removal orders and in 19 others a decision was taken by the authorities to block offending URLs.

When compared with the millions of URLs taken down in the West every single week, the Russian effort appears somewhat minuscule, particularly given the fanfare which heralded the law’s introduction. Nevertheless, the government is now claiming that the legislation is working very well – surprisingly well in fact.

“Last year was a turning point in terms of the fight against piracy on the Internet,” Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov told the State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly.

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

Despite the minister’s enthusiasm, Oleg Tumanov, founder of IVI.ru, a major Hollywood partner and streaming portal described as Russia’s HULU, says things aren’t quite as straightforward.

“We have not felt the effect of this law and large Internet companies that actually affect the market have not even signed a memorandum of pre-trial settlement of disputes,” Tumanov recently complained.

It is worth noting that at the same time as suggesting the law might be ineffective, IVI.ru enjoyed double the number of visitors in 2013 than it did the previous year. However, the company says this was down to its own work and investment, having signed deals with all the major Hollywood studios to become the largest source of licensed video content in Russia.

Availability of content is a sure-fire winner when it comes to bringing in visitors and perhaps the single most important factor when trying to beat piracy. Concentrating on that, rather than introducing yet more legislation, should prove far more useful in the long-term.

As to whether millions of people are flooding to legal content in Russia due to an anti-piracy law that carries no sanctions against them whatsoever, is a matter still up for debate and one that could further cast doubt on the government’s claims.

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.

As a result the site has drawn criticism from record companies around the world and earlier this year was sued by a local label.

In June 2013, Studia Soyuz claimed that VKontakte was infringing its copyrights on more than 60 tracks and should therefore pay damages of 4,575,000 rubles ($144,000) to the label. The case has now been concluded and it didn’t go well for the company.

According to a statement on the website of the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and Leningrad, Soyuz were left high and dry after the court held that Vkontakte could not be held responsible for its users’ infringements.

The Court did recognize that VKontakte’s users had posted several dozen Soyuz-owned tracks to the file-sharing network but noted that none of VKontakte’s operators were directly involved in the “downloading, recording or dissemination” of the music detailed in the lawsuit. As a mere communications platform, VKontakte could not be held liable for its users’ actions provided it took action to remove unauthorized content once informed.

The judgment also considered some of the practicalities of holding the social network liable for the many hundreds of millions of actions carried out by its users every single day.

The Court recognized that it would be impossible to monitor all of the submissions to the site and accepted that assessing whether those submissions were also copyright-infringing would be beyond VKontakte’s abilities. Some artists, Soyuz’s included, had previously uploaded their own songs to the social network.

As a result the Court concluded that if any copyright infringing activity had taken place it would be the responsibility of the users who carried it out and VKontakte could not be held liable.

While the decision will be welcomed by the social networking site, it is believed that VKontakte may soon become a useful ally of the music industry.

Earlier this year the site’s founder said that talks were underway with Universal, Warner and Sony with a view to making their content available to the site’s users as part of a licensing deal.

Any positive agreement along those lines would be welcome by the United States Trade Representative, who previously labeled VKontakte a “rogue site.”

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.