Rights holders threaten to block Telegram in Russia if they do not remove the pirated bot Flibusta
Almost a year ago, access to the Flibusta.net e-library was blocked in Russia for illegally distributing the book "451 degrees Fahrenheit" and other Ray Bradbury translations.
Access to the site, of course, can be obtained in many other ways: through gates, proxy, VPN, Tor, browser extensions and so on. Recently, another option has appeared - request the necessary book from the library via the Flibusta bot in the Telegram messenger .
This creative did not like copyright holders. They require the administration of Telegram to remove the Flibusta bot, otherwise they will turn to the infamous Moscow City Court, which has forever blocked more than a dozen sites in the Russian Federation. Now danger threatens the Telegram service. Applications can be removed from the Google Play and AppStore catalogs.
Director of the Association for the Protection of copyright on the Internet (AZAPO) Maxim Ryabyko said in an interview to "Izvestia", that the user-bot @flibustamirrorbot rightsholders found three books for which rights owned by:
AZAPI hopes for a pre-trial settlement of the dispute. Pavel Durov and his company Telegram must remove the bot within 48 hours. The corresponding notification was sent to the address of the host of the site telegram.org.
“If during this time the primary reaction does not follow, we will write a letter to Google and Apple and we will expect a primary reaction from them. If there is no answer from them, we will sue the Moscow City Court, ”warned Maxim Ryabyko.
It should be noted that the Moscow City Court has not yet considered a single lawsuit about blocking applications. At the same time, Google and Apple recently agreed with Roskomnadzor on the mechanism of pre-trial blocking of applications and other content in the Google Play and AppStore catalogs: applications should be removed immediately after the copyright holder’s complaint.
“We can not reliably establish whether the blocked site Flibusta.net is related to the bot. By ID, some books are the same as those on Flibusta, and sometimes they do not coincide, ”admits Maxim Ryabyko. However, this does not relieve responsibility from the administration of Telegram, he said.
Herman Klimenko, chairman of the board of the Institute for Internet Development, says Telegram will respond to the requirements of copyright advocates: “How Pavel will behave, it’s quite simple to predict if you remember his attitude to copyrights when he led VKontakte,” he will publicly ignore.
Access to the site, of course, can be obtained in many other ways: through gates, proxy, VPN, Tor, browser extensions and so on. Recently, another option has appeared - request the necessary book from the library via the Flibusta bot in the Telegram messenger .
This creative did not like copyright holders. They require the administration of Telegram to remove the Flibusta bot, otherwise they will turn to the infamous Moscow City Court, which has forever blocked more than a dozen sites in the Russian Federation. Now danger threatens the Telegram service. Applications can be removed from the Google Play and AppStore catalogs.
Director of the Association for the Protection of copyright on the Internet (AZAPO) Maxim Ryabyko said in an interview to "Izvestia", that the user-bot @flibustamirrorbot rightsholders found three books for which rights owned by:
- Yandex Book, Alpina Publisher;
- “All the King's Men”, author Mikhail Zygar, publishing house “Mann, Ivanov and Ferber” [note: most likely Ryabyko meant the book “All Kremlin Brother”, publishing house “Intellectual Literature”];
- “Confessions of an Economic Killer” by John Parkens, Pretext Publishing House.
AZAPI hopes for a pre-trial settlement of the dispute. Pavel Durov and his company Telegram must remove the bot within 48 hours. The corresponding notification was sent to the address of the host of the site telegram.org.
“If during this time the primary reaction does not follow, we will write a letter to Google and Apple and we will expect a primary reaction from them. If there is no answer from them, we will sue the Moscow City Court, ”warned Maxim Ryabyko.
It should be noted that the Moscow City Court has not yet considered a single lawsuit about blocking applications. At the same time, Google and Apple recently agreed with Roskomnadzor on the mechanism of pre-trial blocking of applications and other content in the Google Play and AppStore catalogs: applications should be removed immediately after the copyright holder’s complaint.
“We can not reliably establish whether the blocked site Flibusta.net is related to the bot. By ID, some books are the same as those on Flibusta, and sometimes they do not coincide, ”admits Maxim Ryabyko. However, this does not relieve responsibility from the administration of Telegram, he said.
Herman Klimenko, chairman of the board of the Institute for Internet Development, says Telegram will respond to the requirements of copyright advocates: “How Pavel will behave, it’s quite simple to predict if you remember his attitude to copyrights when he led VKontakte,” he will publicly ignore.