Category: Uncategorised

As reported rbc Russian movie producers (Sergey Selyanov from “STV”, Fedor Bondarchuk and Dmitry Rudkovsky from Art Pictures, Timur Vainstein from “Vaite Media”, Gevond Andreasyan from “Enjoy Movies” and George Shabanov from “All Media”) have signed and sent collective letter to Russian ministry of culture. The letter is addressed to Russian minister of culture Vladimir Medinsky. They aim to get support from Russian ministry of culture in distribution of their movies. They concerns about New Year competition with foreign movies. Some of these companies have produced movies with support of governmental Movie Fund. These movies will be released on 31^st of December 2015 and 1^st of January 2016. A few foreign films will be also released in Russia on the same dates. Russian producers have concerns that it will be pretty hard to earn money on distribution of certain Russian movies in order to cover expenditures spent on production of these movies if these films will compete with foreign films. Therefore signers asked for state support in relation to certain films produced by their companies.

The marketplace for music is changing dramatically. New technologies are transforming the way people listen to music, substantially altering the economics of the music business, particularly for songwriters and composers. Streaming music through services such as Pandora, Spotify and iTunes Radio is quickly surpassing physical music sales and digital downloads in popularity. Digital audio-visual services such as Netflix and Amazon are revolutionizing the ways in which the world watches television and movies, changing the traditional media landscape.

Removing Restrictions to e-Commerce. Territorial restrictions and geo-blocking: goods and services (official)

There are two common types of market practices and territorial restrictions which differentiate between consumers within the Internal Market: geo-blocking, i.e. simple refusal to sell or automatic re-routing and geo-filtering, i.e. unjustified diversifying of sale conditions. These practices are commonly based on the location of the consumer, which is for instance determined by means of the IP address used by the consumer, the country which is registered for the customer’s means of payment or the postal or delivery address indicated by the consumer. Companies tend to apply geo-blocking for three reasons: (a) compliance with legislation, (b) contractual arrangements, and (c) unilateral commercial decisions.

The essence of private copying levy is compensation to right holders for copies made by private persons. As long as it is impossible to prohibit copying (reproduction) of phonograms and audiovisual works by private persons and in practice there is no opportunity to collect private levy personally from each natural person. Therefore such remuneration is to be paid by manufacturers and importers of equipment and mediums capable of copying (players, personal computers, phones, compact disks, tape recorders). In its turn, in order to reimburse paid remuneration, importers and manufacturers include paid levy in selling price and eventually customers, when buy equipment and mediums capable of copying, pay indirectly this private copying levy and compensate harm incurred by right holders from private copying.

Roskomnadzor can block domains in .ru and .рф zones under current and effective Russian law. But this blocking is effective in Russia, in other countries web-sites, included in black list in Russia, can be accessible. In order to make blocking faster and more effective, new idea to make Roskomnadzor’s authority broader has been proposed. Would it be better, if Roskomnadzor had authority to block domains worldwide without court order? Certainly it relates to domains in .ru and .рф zones.

Grigory Pirumov, deputy of Russian minister of culture, has written a letter to control office of presidential administration. In his letter he considered few issues relating to activity of Russian collecting societies. Right holders must receive royalties in accordance with actual usage of their musical works, statistical data is not suitable for these purposes. Besides, Russian CMOs have to distribute at least 75% of all collected royalties among right holders, whose rights are managed by CMO.

Online intermediaries (official)

One of the key elements of the e-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC), and one that has underpinned the development of the internet in Europe, is the principle that intermediary service providers (ISP) are not liable for the content of “illegal” information that they transmit, cache or host, provided that they do not modify the information or have actual knowledge of its illegality and act expeditiously to remove or disable access on becoming aware of it. This exemption from liability is sometimes referred to as the “mere conduit” exemption.