Russian Ministry of Culture (MinCult) proposed to develop a mechanism protecting national movies and preventing their illegal distribution in Internet. Sounds like a call. So, there is no legal proposal in the form of draft law. There is no draft law, but initiative is presented as legal proposal on portal of legal acts. It is not the first idea of MinCult to restrict access to pirate content in Internet without court’s participation.
MinCult underlines that since 1 August 2013 the “antipiracy law” is in force in Russia. This law provides restriction of access to illegally placed movie under the court order. But ministry believes legal practice demonstrates ineffectiveness of such measures provided in antipiracy law, especially in relation to national, i.e. Russian, movies. Such ineffectiveness entails huge financial losses to movie industry.
But MinCult does not disclose yet what exactly it proposes. In a passport of draft law there is no text of proposed law. One officer of MinCult has explained that “textually it is not ready”. But he disclosed the main idea. If the rights in national movie are infringed in Internet and relevant right holder has complained to MinCult about such infringement, MinCult checks in movie registry whether such right holder exist and whether such right holder holds rights in movie in Russia.
If everything is OK with right holder, his rights in movie in question, MinCult ask Russian Roskomnadzor to block page, where the movie is placed illegally, i.e. in other words to restrict access to pirate page (or web-resource). Roskomnadzor, in its turn, would ask Internet Service Providers to restrict access to pirate web-page or web-resource. Thus the need in court order would be eliminated in order to “form the system of operational extrajudicial blocking of pirate pages”, – explained deputy of the Russian minister of culture.