The founder of the electronic library "Litmer" received 2 years conditionally. Site blocked

For the first time in the history of Russia, a criminal case was instituted against the founder of the electronic library. On March 4, Stepan Entsov, the former owner of the popular Litmer website, was sentenced to two years of probation on the suit of the Eksmo publishing house. He was charged with violation of part 3 of clause “c” of Article 146 (“Illegal use of objects of copyright or related rights, as well as acquisition, storage, transportation of counterfeit works, committed on a large scale”). The maximum penalty for this clause is six years of imprisonment 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 on the Internet (AZAPI) a decision was made to permanently block the site Rutracker.org in Russia. This time, the right holders did not demand blocking of the resource, but appealed to the police, which resulted in a criminal case.

At the same time, on March 1, Roskomnadzor blocked the address litmir.co , IP addresses 104.20.69.131 and 104.20.70.131 at the suit of another publishing house “Litsovet”. Access is possible only through proxy servers and VPN.

“It was established that the monthly income received by the owner of the Litmir website from the use of foreign intellectual property exceeded 1 million rubles; resource attendance was over 14 million visits per month. Interestingly, while dozens of people worked on the site without payment, because the owner misled them, claiming that his resource existed only on donations. “Volunteer” employees decided not to involve in the process, ”said a press release from AZAPI.
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Punishment can be considered soft. The court took into account that the defendant paid compensation of 5 million rubles, pledged to restrict access to the books of AZAPI clients and began the process of legalizing the content of the site. True, what is the legalization is not entirely clear. Now there are 23,650 books in the public library, and the site seems to have moved to a new administration.

Compensation paid for the misuse of about a hundred books of the publishing house "Eksmo." Due to the fact that the owner of the site admitted his guilt, the Association did not make financial claims on the full list of works of the publishing house, which would have made several thousand books, reports AZAPI and reminds the background of the conflict: “The site gained widespread popularity in 2015 claims of authors and copyright holders, choosing a malicious "pirate" path of development. Previously, the site owner behaved more adequately - he responded to letters, sometimes he responded to the claims of the copyright holders, shot works violating someone else’s copyright. However, this kind of imputed scheme of work somehow ceased to suit him and Litmir launched into all serious ones: the site changed the registrar to a foreign one, “covered” the hoster with the cloud service Cloudflare and turned its efforts towards maximum earnings under the pirated scheme. The site administrators ignored the numerous claims of the right holders, illegally laid out for downloading books by Russian and foreign authors, did not remove the publication of the claim publications, and even published books under the name of well-known authors that were not written by them; the requirements 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, SU UMVD of Russia established the identity of the site owner, a 27-year-old resident of Cheboksary Entsov Stepan Evgenievich.

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

Journalists from Gazeta.ru have studied Stepan Entsov’s profiles on social networks and point out his natural ingenuity . At the age of 17, Stepan invented the perpetual motion machine - “a magnetodynamic engine on a superconductor”, similar to a pair of immersion heaters connected by a jumper. Photos and descriptions 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 the technical school after the 9th grade.



Now the entrepreneur owns several apartments in a prestigious district of the city, is registered on the paid dating site “Fotostrana”, visits groups of erotic subjects, and in 2015 he rested with his family in a five-star hotel in Goa.

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

If the right holders go to the end, then the criminal case could threaten the owners of Rutracker.org. At least, this is foreseen by Leonid Agronov, general director of the National Federation of the Music Industry (unites music studios Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music, etc.). He said that right holders expect to “meet them in person in the SIZO.”