The Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPI, representing the interests of large Russian publishing houses – AST, Eksmo, Alpiny, MIF, Azbuka-Atticus, etc.) asked Roskomnadzor to bring Facebook Inc. to administrative responsibility. for the massive piracy of books on the Facebook-owned social network Instagram and the failure to remove links to illegal copies of works. This was reported by Vedomosti with reference to the letter of the association.
According to Maksim Ryabyko, a member of the board of AZAPI, at the end of the year, Instagram for the first time entered the top 3 sites with the largest number of identified links to illegal copies of books. According to the association, Telegram takes the first place – about 35 thousand illegal copies of books and links to them identified and deleted at the request of AZAPI, in second place is Instagram – more than 3 thousand such links in user accounts, on the third YouTube – about 2.4 thousand links.
The AZAPI message states that the copyright holder has the opportunity to demand the removal of illegally posted content or links to it on the social network through a special form, but not all such links are removed. For example, Instagram in some cases does not even remove links to the content of copyright holders, in respect of which the Moscow City Court has already taken interim measures, according to a letter from AZAPI to Roskomnadzor. “Such statistics and experience of law enforcement allow us to conclude that Instagram patronizes pirates, the fight against them is not on the platform of a complex effective nature, but comes down to formal processing of links, which does not allow us to radically and qualitatively change the situation with pirated content”, – said in the letter.
The applicants asked the supervisory authority to bring Facebook to administrative responsibility under Part 2 of Art. 13.41 of the Administrative Code of Russia (non-removal of illegal content). The punishment under this article for legal entities provides for a fine from 800 thousand to 4 million rubles.
According to Vedomosti's calculations, the book market annually loses 15–20%, or about 1.5 billion rubles, from the activities of pirates. At the same time, e-books are one of the main drivers of the development of the entire book market in Russia, their sales – in contrast to sales of paper books – grew by 32% in 2020.
In August, AST and Eksmo publishers filed lawsuits against Telegram for distributing pirated copies of Stephen King's 11/22/63 and Doctor Sleep, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033, Ni Sy “Jen Cinsero and” Mara and Darkness “Leah Arden also won the case. The court satisfied the requirement for interim measures and ordered Roskomnadzor “to stop creating technical conditions for the placement, distribution and other use” of pirated content in Telegram. Then Ryabyko said that AZAPI is trying to gain a “critical mass” of court decisions, which will allow blocking Telegram for multiple violations.
Earlier, a bill was introduced to the State Duma, which provides for the extrajudicial exclusion of links to sites with pirated content from search engines. Thus, the draft law says that copyright holders will have the opportunity to create information systems containing databases of page pointers with content that violates copyright. They also specified that Roskomnadzor will keep the registers of these systems.
