Writers ask Yandex to remove pirated content from search results

    Yesterday, the website of Eksmo Publishing House published an appeal by writers and cultural figures (13 in total) to the management of Yandex, or rather, personally to the head of the company Arkady Volozh.

    “Concerned about the detrimental effect of piracy on the development of Russian literature and culture,” writers urge Yandex to remove links to pirated sites and stolen content from search results. The removal of content from the issuance at the request of the copyright holder, the writers claim, is in line with international practice and "it is this mechanism that Google uses today."

    Google really removes links to pirated content at the user's request. Moreover, since January 2011, they have even censored autocompletion of search queries, removing from there the "pirate" terms like [torrent] and [rapidshare].

    But Yandex is not at all obliged to follow American copyright laws, because Yandex is a Russian company (Sberbank’s gold share).

    The press service of Yandex quickly responded with the expected response that the company has the right to determine the policy for placing content and impose restrictions on it only where it acts as a hoster, that is, for example, on Yandex.Narod, Yandex.Video services , Yandex.Fotki, but does not have the right, at its discretion, to intervene in matters of the use of third-party copyright objects by third parties.

    Everything is correct. Although Yandex makes money on pirated content and runs contextual advertising on pirated requests, it does it within the framework of the law and there can be no complaints about it. The search engine can’t take the technical task of filtering pirated content or the administrative task of removing pages at the request of copyright holders.

    Book publishers believe that it is the search engines that need to be asked to combat piracy, although this is not the case in Russia. In this sense, one fact that is mentioned in the article “Kommersant” is surprising .. It alleges that in April 2011, Russian Google, according to Eksmo, without judicial intervention removed 446 links to 106 pirated sites from the search results. As indicated in the search results, when deleting links, Google was guided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that is, American law.

    Lawyers explain that, under Russian law, a search engine is not required to respond to the call of copyright holders. She can do this only as a gesture of goodwill or for the sake of a PR effect.

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