News - 14/02/2014

Russia: IFPI wants vKontakte to work with the industry, Tracks Flow faces block

Russia: IFPI wants vKontakte to work with the industry, Tracks Flow faces block


A couple of interesting stories coming out of Russia this week.
On the one hand Frances Moore, the head of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), in an opinion piece published by CMU targeted Russian social network vKontakte as a company that could do a lot more to promote legal music content in the territory.

Moore writes: “vKontakte should not wait for an IPO to seize this opportunity. It should act now, take steps to stop facilitating piracy and become a licensed participant in the music business. Working with record companies vKontakte could be a powerful player in a fast-growing licensed Russian music sector.”

Moore though also acknowledges a change in tides when it comes to the Russian government’s stance on Piracy.

This is reflected in the second story coming from Russia this week: the potential block to Tracks Flow due to a new copyright laws in the country, which according to TorrentFreak have been dubbed as “Russia’s SOPA”.

Tracks Flow had been taken to court by SBA Music Publishing which accused the service of infringing on its copyright. The Moscow Arbitration Court has now decided to order the termination of the Tracks Flow domain and awarded the publisher with $44k in damages. As a site that merely links to sources Tracks Flow maintains it didn't distribute pirated content and that of late most of its links were going out to SoundCloud and YouTube.

Of course, as Tracks Flow's domain is not administered in Russia the "block" will have to take some other shape - after all courts have never been particularly clued up when it comes to enforcing these sorts of measures. One potential scenario is for the judge to ask ISPs to block the domain in the country.

Aside from this individual story it does look like things are changing in Russia and this early victory could spur copyright holders to invest more cash in lawsuits against illegal sites in the country.


(Andrea Leonelli)

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