Russia: Fight Against Internet Piracy Moving Ahead

Ekaterina Mironova, Senior Associate
Yulia Gendlina, Associate
Hannes Snellman Attorneys Ltd, St. Petersburg

Increasing the level of the populace’s legal awareness and conscience is the priority concern in the fight against the illegal dissemination and use of copyrighted works.

Several years ago, a wave of actions aimed at fighting manufacturers and distributors of pirated goods swept through Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and throughout Russian regions.

The growth of the activeness of Russian law enforcement agencies in relation to the battle against legislative violations in the field of intellectual property is evidenced by the substantial increase in the number of judicial proceedings initiated by the law enforcement agencies and the office of the prosecutor and lawsuits concerning violations of copyrights submitted by citizens and legal entities in recent years.

The fight against internet piracy in Russia has recently been essentially limited to closing web sites isseminating pornography or extremist contents. However, in February 2010, the battle with internet piracy on the Russian internet has moved to a fundamentally new level and touched on protecting copyrights.

One of the most notorious events in February for the Russian internet was the suspension of the web site torrents.ru, which is registered in the name of Dreamtorrent Corp. This popular file exchanging service (site tracker) offered users various, and at times unique contents, such as films, books, music, and computer programmes.

Torrents.ru was one of the most popular web sites in Russia, with more than four million active users per month and approximately one million torrents. The closing of the site gave rise to a colossal outcry on the Russian internet.

Torrent site suspended by an order from the prosecutor
RU-CENTER, an accredited registrar of domain names in Russian domains (.ru), suspended the operation of the domain name torrents.ru on the basis of an order from the office of the prosecutor.

Based on information available on the internet, it is possible to speculate that the office of the prosecutor has suspected that torrents.ru is contributing to the distribution of unlicensed products. It would be therefore, that the prosecutor requested stopping the operation of the domain in connection with carrying out a certain preliminary investigation.

This was part of a criminal case initiated on the basis of Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of copyrights and related rights) in relation to an individual which has recorded a pirated computer programme on a computer’s hard drive.

From the legal point of view, the order is not absolutely binding, which the office of the prosecutor has stressed. It did not require the mandatory suspension of the web site.

The law states that this order is subject to review by its addressee, who is required to notify on the measures undertaken no later than one month from the day it was adopted. However, after reviewing the prosecutor office’s order, RU-CENTER suspended the web site.

Does the web site owner infringe copyright ?
In connection with the suspension of the domain’s operation, a heated discussion dedicated to whether or not torrents.ru violated any copyrights was sparked on the internet. The majority of experts arrived at the opinion that the answer is negative. Formally the owner of the website does not use any works and there are no files with works on its server.

Copyrights are violated by those who directly provide access to files with pirated work and use such works. However, it appears that it is not possible to exclude the fact that the owner of the web site could have contributed to the violation of copyrights.

Needless to say, the existing situation should be given a qualified evaluation by judicial bodies.

Suspending the torrent site is not enough
The strength of the outcry, which arose as a result of this situation, is explained by the fact that in Russia this is virtually the first precedent and the first serious, large-scale attempt to protect copyrights on the internet.

It is obvious that the suspension of a torrent tracker, even a large one, may not be considered to be a sufficient measure for effectively battling internet piracy – especially as new similar web sites are likely to come up.

Without conducting a planned and systematic campaign against piracy, all technical methods for protecting against piracy and state executive authorities will be ineffective.

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