ECHONOMICS: why the rightholders are eagerly awaiting the enacting of the “anti-piracy” law

President of Russia Vladimir Putin signed the law on protection of intellectual rights in the Internet – the Federal Law No. 187 “On making amendments to certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation on the matters of protection of intellectual rights in the information and telecommunication networks”. The experts’ community is actively discussing the problem of violation of copyright, paying special attention to illegal distribution of video and audio recordings.

An expert’s commentary:

Advocate Denis Shumskiy of the Law Firm "YUST"

The new rules stipulated by the law on protection of intellectual rights in the Internet will enter into force on August 1st of 2013. Introduction of accelerated procedure of blocking websites, where illegal copies of films may be downloaded from, is the main novelty. The copyright holder will be able to file a claim with the Moscow City Court, including by electronic means. The Moscow City Court, not later than on the following day, rules to limit the access to the respective resource. The determination is then passed to the Roskomnadzor, which notifies the hosting provider of the need to block the site within three days. In its turn, the latter notifies the resource owner within one day, who then must remove the illegal content. If this does not occur, the hosting provider must block the respective resource. If the provider is also idle, the communications operator does the blocking. No special liability for violation of said procedure is fixed for the hosting provider or the communications operator. However, they bear equal liability with the offender from the moment they receive information of the illegality of the content of a certain website. Now the elimination of illegal copies of any content from the Web requires laborious and quite time-consuming work. Should the draft law be approved, the copyright owners will be endowed with a very efficient instrument in their fight against illegal distribution of cinema production over the Web. Still, it remains unclear, why those cases were given to the competency of the Moscow City Court, if the specialized court on intellectual rights has recently entered service.

The expert’s opinion is available as a recording: “Echo Moskvy”, Echonomics, 02.07.2013 (on oar on 14:35).