The official position of the administration opensharing.org on the issue of blocking the resource Roskomnadzor

Greetings dear Habrasoobschestvo!

As an authorized representative of opensharing.org, I have been instructed to voice the official position of the administration on the issue of blocking our resource by Roskomnadzor.
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By chance, our resource had the dubious honor of becoming the first victim of the “anti-piracy” law No. 187-FZ. On August 21, 2013, we were “made happy” by entering into the “pirate” registry . The incident caused us, to put it mildly, bewilderment, as well as a lot of questions.

Let's take a look at it from now on

Let's start with the fact that on our resource on each page there is a link to information for rightholders , where everything is written, literally by points, that is related to the interaction between the rightholders and the resource. Anyone who approached us and provided the relevant documents was convinced that the administration of opensharing.org responded quite adequately to requests for the removal of content. However, every sane person should understand that it is not enough just to write that I, supposedly, such and such, own the rights to this and that - I think this is clear without undue comments. If someone came to us with "bare" demands, then, quite naturally, there could be no reaction from our side.

If the request is sent by all the rules, then in order to respond, it takes some time, therefore, it is quite logical to assume that the removal of the requested content does not happen this minute, but after several working days. Also, it is necessary to take into account the human factor and understand that sending a legitimate initial request in all respects does not guarantee its execution within guaranteed timeframes, if only because some intermediate failures may occur, such as technical problems in the mail, busy or temporary unavailability of the administration of the resource, an error in the final destination, and the like. Therefore, before running to court, throwing money away from lawyers, it would be nice to double-check the email address where the request was sent, and, if necessary, after a while, repeat the request again - thus, the right holder will save time and money, and We will save nerves for ourselves and our users.

Regarding the latest events, so generously and with a large share of fantasy painted by an enormous number of online publications, I would like to open my eyes to the fact that the actions of Roskomnadzor differ somewhat from the order of things described in the new law, and which Mr. Zharov says in his interview .

How it looked and happened with the words of Mr. Zharov

After the court has received the writ of execution, Roskomnadzor contacts the administration of the resource and the representatives of the hosting where the resource is served. During the day, according to Mr. Zharov, the hosting provider can contact the administration of the resource, communicate its position and ask to take all measures to resolve the conflict. If it is not possible to contact the administration or the administration does not make contact, the hosting provider has a couple more days to close access to the resource on its own and on its own or to delete content by reporting its actions to Roskomnadzor. In total, it is not difficult to calculate that after receiving the writ of execution before blocking the resource Roskomnadzor should take about 72 hours, during which there is a correspondence and some actions are taken, in which all interested parties participate.

A brief outline of the procedure can be found here:

How it all really happened

What happened in our case? On August 21, we learned from the media that our site was blocked and information about it was added to the registry for blocking by telecom operators. Wow! - we thought and immediately began to “wool” the resource mail for the missing letters from Roskomnadzor. As you understand, there were no letters and official addresses from them. Well, anything can happen, we thought, and decided to rely on our hosting provider. As we were assured by Andrey Kuznetsov, a representative of the hosting provider iprosrv.com, where the resource server is serviced, at that time there were no calls or letters from Roskomnadzor regarding our resource. Immediately, it was decided to double-check the content listed in the registry, delete if there is something to remove (and it turned out that far from all of the listed in the registry was present) and expect further developments. Already in the evening the hosting provider contacted us and informed about the receipt of the letter from Roskomnadzor, to which company representatives promptly replied that the content indicated in the letter had already been removed from the resource. That is, as you understand, everything was settled in one day with the mutual consent of the parties. Since then, the resource has stopped waiting for a denouement.

Recall that the resource has already been blocked, no emails from Roskomnadzor have been received by opensharing mail. Nothing of what was happening hinted at anything about the procedure that Mr. Zharov described colorfully. The only thing we had was a letter that was sent to us by the hosting provider from Roskomnadzor .

And now, after almost a week, on August 26, as well as in the case of blocking, through the media, we will learn about unlocking the resource. And again, we never received any letters and responses to our appeals to Roskomnadzor ...

Naturally, in the light of the above events, a dilemma arises before the resource administration:

- on the one hand, there is no desire to enter into open conflict with the law, because, despite popular opinion among members of society, who are copyright and consider any file sharing service as a priori pirated site, we always tried to meet the right holders with due understanding from their side the fact that we, before removing something, must have good reason, that is, documents confirming the rights to possess anything.

- on the other hand, seeing how the law actually “works”, having felt this dubious pleasure in its own skin, so to speak, the question arose - why adhere to the letter of the law if the law itself wanted to spit on this very letter and procedure for enforcing the law?

- and also, what about, for example, that the hosting, the services of which the resource uses, is outside the coverage of Russian laws? What if the hoster is deeply violet on our problems with the Law? To him this is how it relates? Theoretically, the hoster could ignore the requirements of Roskomnadzor and nothing to inform the client. He gets his profit and okay. Thus, how can we follow the law if we are not informed that we allegedly violated it? Why does Roskomnadzor consider it sufficient to notify only the hoster? What prevented in parallel to send a request directly to the administration of the resource? No need to assure us that they sent letters, and we did not respond. It was in our interest to respond to the demands of Roskomnadzor, based on a court order, and not to bring the case to block the resource. Questions, questions, questions, and there is no end to them ... but, one way or another, a definite answer can be considered reality, which is well outlined in one of Krylov's unshakable works - “You are guilty only in what I want to eat” - answered The wolf and into the forest

Looking back, in the light of the understanding of the new realities, when the right holder does not necessarily have to directly contact the owners of the resources that in their opinion violate their rights, and any resource can be blocked with notification a la after the fact, it seems to us that we did the right thing by coming to a conclusion , albeit disappointing - if our resource wants to protect users from the inconvenience associated with the inaccessibility of our site, we had to take measures that are at the time the least evil, that is, remove the objects remaining in the list s with the resource and wait for "tacit" approval Roskomnadzor. About what we have come, we have already told you. Draw conclusions, gentlemen.

P.S

One can argue long and tediously about the moral aspect of file sharing as such, but if we stick to the facts, the law, which should regulate the relationship between rights holders and those who are considered to violate their rights, acts instead, almost always, from the point of view of intimidation and showing off - they say, look how we work! We closed the pirate site, we punish the naughty! But, sorry, our resource was not closed, it continued to work as usual, with the only difference that some users from Russia are limited in access to the resource, which, however, does not prevent us from circumventing these restrictions in many ways. Punished? Not a resource is punished, but ordinary people, users of our resource, who due to various circumstances are forced to search for the content they need on the network and break non-working laws just because it is easier for someone to fight windmills instead of finally realizing it. DOES NOT WORK and you need to “turn on the mosk”, as expressed in the network slang, and finally develop a concept in which the authors (what is meant by the term “author” is a separate and rather ambiguous topic), it is the authors, not the crowd of mediators who are shoveling money with a shovel from the pockets of far from fattening Russians, and not only Russians, will be able to receive PROFITS for their work, and not miserable deductions, sometimes completely ridiculous, from instances that DO NOT CREATE ANYTHING, but only use ALREADY CREATED, having called EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS, and to provide an opportunity for content consumers to choose what, how and for what amount to encourage with the monetary equivalent of these same authors. Of course, this is not a trivial task; here it is necessary to analyze a lot, study and introduce new technologies, go into conflict with a huge number of instances who don’t want to part with any opportunity to milk the golden calf with the least effort. It is not simple. But this is the only way to reconcile file sharing with “illegal” content.

In conclusion, it is worth noting once again that, as before, the administration of our resource is ready to interact with the right holders in accordance with the law in force and under the conditions described on our resource - provide documents confirming your rights and credentials - we delete the content.
As for Roskomnadzor, we hope that the incident will not happen again, and if we have any complaints, we will be notified of this in a timely manner, and not after the application of sanctions.

Otherwise, time will tell who is right, who is to blame, and where we all will come.

Regards, opensharing.org administration

UPDATE: news from the “front” - taken from the openingsharing admin comment :

You will laugh, but we have "the second part of the Marlezons ballet"

www.rsoc.ru/news/rsoc/news21473.htm

“Perhaps for this reason, the file sharing network opensharing.org, which was excluded from the register of pirate resources yesterday, resumed distribution of video content, in respect of which the Moscow City Court decided to introduce interim measures. Roskomnadzor today, August 27, 2013, re-entered its IP address in the registry for the implementation of a hard block by telecom operators. ”

I would like to contact the users of Habr and try to find and download from Opensharing.org anything from this list

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