The founder of the electronic library "Litmir" received 2 years probation. The site is blocked.

    For the first time in the history of Russia, a criminal case has been instituted against the founder of the electronic library. On March 4, according to the lawsuit of the Eksmo publishing house, the former owner of the popular Litmir website , Stepan Yentsov, was sentenced to two years of probation . He was charged with violation of part 3 of paragraph “c” of article 146 (“Illegal use of objects of copyright or related rights, as well as the acquisition, storage, transportation of counterfeit works committed on an especially large scale”). The maximum penalty for this item is six years in prison with a fine of up to 500 thousand rubles.

    Recall that it was thanks to the publishing house Eksmo and the Association for the Protection of Copyright in the Internet (AZAPI) that a decision was made to permanently block the Rutracker.org website in Russia. This time, the copyright holders did not demand the blocking of the resource, but turned to the police, which resulted in a criminal case.

    At the same time, on the lawsuit of another publishing house Litsovet, on March 1, Roskomnadzor blocked the address litmir.co , the IP addresses 104.20.69.131 and 104.20.70.131. Access is possible only through proxies and VPNs.

    “It was found that the monthly income received by the owner of the Litmir website from the use of someone else's intellectual property exceeded 1 million rubles; resource attendance was over 14 million visits per month. Interestingly, at the same time, dozens of people worked on the site without payment, since the owner misled them, claiming that his resource exists only on donations. They decided not to involve “voluntary” employees in the process, ”the AZAPI press release said.

    The punishment can be considered mild. The court took into account that the defendant paid compensation of 5 million rubles, pledged to limit access to books of AZAPI clients and began the process of legalizing site content. True, what is legalization is not entirely clear. Now the library has 23650 books in the public domain, and the site seems to have been transferred to the new administration.

    Compensation was paid for the misuse of about a hundred books by Eksmo Publishing House. Due to the fact that the site owner admitted his guilt, the Association did not make financial claims on the full list of the publisher’s works, which would amount to several thousand books, AZAPI reports and recalls the background of the conflict: “The site gained mass popularity in 2015, when it took the path of ignoring claims of authors and copyright holders, choosing a malicious "pirate" way of development. Previously, the owner of the site behaved more adequately - responded to letters, sometimes reacted to claims of copyright holders, removed works violating other people's copyrights. However, such a sane scheme of work for some reason ceased to suit him and Litmir went all out: the site changed the registrar to a foreign one, “Covered” the host with the Cloudflare cloud service and turned its efforts to maximize earnings under a pirated scheme. The site administrators ignored the numerous claims of the copyright holders, unlawfully uploaded books by Russian and foreign authors for download, did not remove from the publication claims publications, and even published books written not by them under the name of famous authors; the demands of the authors themselves to remove other people's works from their sections were also ignored.

    Despite the privacy settings and the use of proxy servers, VPN and i2p for anonymous site management, the Administration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia established the identity of the site owner, Stepan Evgenievich, a 27-year-old resident in Cheboksary.

    A young sole proprietor founded an electronic library in 2011. The site has been repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. Since the beginning of 2016, the site has been managed by the new administration, the identity of the administrator under the nickname Metatron and others could not be determined.

    Journalists of the newspaper Gazeta.ru studied the profiles of Stepan Yentsov on social networks and note his natural ingenuity. At the age of 17, Stepan invented the perpetual motion machine - the “magnetodynamic engine on a superconductor”, similar to a pair of boilers connected by a jumper. A photo and description of the device are published in the journal "Young Technician" ( 01/2006, p. 54-56 ). This is despite the fact that Stepan did not even graduate from college after 9th grade.



    Now the entrepreneur owns several apartments in a prestigious area of ​​the city, is registered on a paid dating site “Photo Country”, visits erotic-themed groups, and in 2015 he was relaxing with his family in a five-star hotel in Goa.

    “This is a serious precedent for the modern practice of combating piracy,” says AZAPI. - In the event of a massive violation of their rights, the copyright holders did not follow the path of blocking the Internet resource, which can be circumvented, but turned to the police for help, which ultimately led to criminal prosecution of the site owner. In addition, it once again demonstrated that, despite all the tricks and tricks used to hide identity, IP and other information about yourself, it is impossible to act on the Web without leaving any traces. ”

    If the copyright holders go to the end, then the criminal case may threaten the owners of Rutracker.org. At least, this is foreseen by the Director General of the National Federation of the Music Industry (combines the music studios Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music, etc.) Leonid Agronov. He saidthat the copyright holders expect to “meet with them personally in jail”.

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