Harnessing Slowly, Riding Fast

According to that law, if the owner of content finds that he is the subject of infringement on the Internet, he files a complaint with the Moscow City Court which immediately issues a ruling to Roscomnadzor (The Federal Service for Supervision in the Field of Communications and Information Technologies) for provisional blocking of the site, who afterwards, consider the complaint. The court holds liable not only the owners of distributed information, but also the hosting providers. These however arc liable if
1) they did not initiate the transmission of information;
2) if they do not change the substance of information and if they do not know that the content they host is unlawful.

PREVENTING INFRINGEMENT

Initially, the anti-piracy law was aimed at blocking unlawful video content. Later amendments to the law extended the scope of protection to other copyrightable matters, such as music, literary works, computer software, and other intellectual property. From 2015, it became possible to block permanently pirated sites. This judgment may be issued if the content owner proves that unlawful content was placed on the Internet twice or more. For instance, access to Rutracker was limited in January 2016 and the number of website visitors curtailed to 2 million as compared to 2015, when there were 8 million visitors. The owners of Rutracker.org gave detailed instructions on how to get around the blocking, hence failure to close it it completely. On the other hand - another source of concent, Dailymotion.com was permanently blocked and it lost its attendance completely.

The law made it difficult for the infringers to continue their unlawful activities. They sought ways to bypass the court judgments. Initially the judgments concerned the infringing websites and in response, infringers created so called 'mirror' websites which were in fact, copies of the infringing websites. The IP owners had to initiate a case again which concluded with the same result. The law responded with more amendments providing for the blocking of these duplicate websites in a simplified procedure. Tile decision on recognition of the site as a mirror site is taken by The Ministry of Communications and from the date of the adoption of this provision (October 2017) 2,421 mirror sites were blocked.

PROTECTING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The law also restricted the use of anonimizers, such as a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

The set of laws responding to the needs of content owners made dramatic changes in the practice of the enforcement of authors' rights. They created new techniques in the enforcement of IP rights on the Internet and a Unified Register of Infringers of Copyrights and Neighbouring Rights has been created, which is updated by Roskomnadzor. It is not yet possible to claim that Internet piracy has been completely defeated, but the law quickly responds to the new challenges as shown above.