Yandex removed 15 million links leading to illegal content sites

“Star Media”, VGTRK and Kinopoisk have filed more than 10 million complaints for 2.5 years after the signing of the Anti-Piracy Memorandum. The most frequently pirated works included the movie “Christmas Trees” and the series “Village of Fools” from the entertainment show “Kalambur”.

Active measures aimed at combating video-piracy began on November 1, 2018, when the largest copyright holders of Russia (“Star Media”, VGTRK, Kinopoisk, TNT TV, “A Serial” and others) signed an Anti-Piracy Memorandum with three Russian search giants of Runet – Yandex , Mail.ru and Rambler. The mediator between the two parties was the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor).

It is worth noting that the process of identifying pirates is complicated by the fact that search engines cannot determine the legal status of content, so the owners of the rights to films, TV shows, songs, sports programs and other intellectual property objects are forced to check the search results either manually or in an automated mode. All links to pirated sites were introduced into a special registry, and later excluded them from search results in the Russian Federation.

Based on the Digital IP materials.