Rights holders and the Internet - from dispute to the market. Yandex Position

The recent hastily adopted law “On arbitrary blocking of websites”, further activity in the form of a memorandum and proposals for expanding the law pursue one goal - a potential increase in the incomes of the right holders. Potential - because there is no reliable or accepted method by which one could realistically assess the material damage caused by the distribution of this or that content on the Web, and supporters of the law are naturally interested in large numbers, because they justify the need for a law.

Leaving aside the discussion about the meaning and legitimacy of copyright, about whether it helps the authors or became a means of exploitation, and separately about why the Soviet legacy belonging to the state turned out to be the property of various commercial companies, we take as its condition its present existence and consider the situation with this condition.

It is absolutely expected and normal that the business wants to maximize profits. At the same time, society would prefer that this happen along with the improvement of the quality of goods and services, rather than by the right of force or monopoly position. And it is strange that business wants to grow rich, not taking into account the new reality, acting in prohibitions, not development, and stubbornly holding on to the old models. Selling films through cinemas is 100 years old, selling through cassettes, and then discs are about 40 years old. Today, a model that is more and more in demand by users is selling through the Internet, and here there is practically no development. And the growing empty niche is filled by those whom rights holders have estimated to be called “pirates”.

Indeed, why is it necessary to go to the cinema to watch a movie at the time indicated by it, pay not only for the movie itself, but also for the building's content, smell popcorn, and even watch the commercial before it starts? Of course, there are fans of collective viewing, a kind of “appearance”, they understand what they are paying for. But for many who want to watch a movie cinema - imposed service. The film appears on the disc then and in such a quality in which the owners would like. You need to buy a disk somewhere. If the film is old, sometimes it cannot be found at all, and sometimes - only in large online stores, that is, you have to wait for delivery and pay for it. The question is - why can not I comfortably watch a movie by downloading it on the Internet legally in the understanding of the right holders, that is, by paying them money? By the way, with a typical DVD price of 99 rubles, which includes printing and distribution costs, I would venture to suggest that the copyright holder gets no more than 20-30 rubles per copy. So, the question is - why is there no good paid offer? Good is with a fairly full catalog of movies, music and other objects in good quality.
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A substantive answer to this question, probably, is the right holders. I can only say how it seems to the consumer. The disc with the film is a commodity, that is, it has a clear price, which varies within small limits. Intellectual property is not a commodity, in the sense that it does not have an understandable price and terms of sale. A business that wants to organize a legal content store should independently examine the status of intellectual property rights, including all kinds of related rights, and negotiate conditions with the right holder that it can change at any time, while taking the same different money with different businesses.

The overall confusion of rights is a worldwide copyright situation. It is well known that many works cannot be published at all, because there is no way to resolve legal issues. In addition, the copyright holder is not obliged to give access to his object of rights at all, even after it has been published at least once. For example, how can you legally watch the beautiful Italian mini-series of the 60s “Don Camillo” with Fernandel in the Russian voice acting? And what to do when merchants decide to trade only colored Stirlitz? And even more so the copyright holder is not obliged to produce anything in good quality. Say, DVDs often come across movies with bad colors and sound.

This state of affairs leads to the appearance of a gray area on the Internet - from sites where people donated and lovingly upload movies, mostly old and not found in other ways, without consulting with the right holders, to fraud sites that offer to download malware under the guise of films your phone number or force the user to go through five advertising screens, just to make sure that in fact there is no movie.

It seems that a mutually beneficial (beneficial for both rightholders and society) way out of this situation would be to create a market - turning films, music, books into goods with transparent and non-discriminatory purchase rules for further use, as well as forming a single database of objects - with a description objects and rights and clear prices for each product. In this case, the object is not listed in the database, gets the right to free distribution. Information should be free (not necessarily free, but accessible) - this message clearly carries the Internet.

The discussion of rightholders and their opponents is not opposed to “paid” / “freebies”, as they often try to present, but in contradiction between hay dogs and a hungry bull.

Now there are rights holders who understand that the Internet offers new business opportunities and are taking steps to develop legal services. Now on the Internet, many companies already know how to make services for people. Let's build a market together.

Elena Kolmanovskaya, co-founder of Yandex