Russian TV companies accused Yandex of piracy

Yesterday it became known that the holding company Gazprom Media (NTV, TV-3 and other channels), the National Media Group (REN TV, Channel Five) and Channel One removed their broadcasts from the main page Yandex. " Television companies believe that the search engine contributes to the development of piracy, leaving links to illegal media content in its extradition, as reported by Kommersant. In order to force the company to solve the problem, its partners resorted to the indicated measures.

Representatives of Yandex, in turn, say that the company complies with Russian legislation and develops legal video. The company began to broadcast the content of TV channels on the main page in 2017. Until now, it was an experiment, coordinated with those television channels whose players are located on search engine sites.

“The situation in which the broadcasters are spinning up Yandex’s media services, providing content, but turning a blind eye to piracy in search results, is destructive for the media industry,” said a spokesman for the NMG Alexey Urazov. He also stressed that revenues from broadcasts are insignificant compared to the "hundreds of millions of rubles of annual losses associated with the distribution of pirated content of broadcasters."

Gazprom Media stated that the presence of illegal content in the search engine output is very critical: “Until the issue of pirated content on Yandex services is resolved, we will not license our content in Yandex.” The Yandex.Video search results contain many links to pirated video resources where the holding's TV channel projects are located. We have repeatedly applied to Yandex with a request to block content in search results in accordance with the principles of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but to no avail. ”
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After the companies have removed the broadcast, the top positions in the TV Online service are occupied by the Yandex channels - we are talking about Comedies and Cartoons.

This is not the first time that large companies accuse Yandex of piracy. Previously, the search engine has already been reproached for not actively fighting the emergence of illegal content. The company commented on all such statements, emphasizing that the right holders have all the possibilities for blocking both illegal sites and their mirrors.

But these arguments are not accepted by media companies. For example, producer Alexander Akopov considers Yandex as the main pirate platform in the country. He argues that the company makes it difficult for everyone to work, and also refuses to discuss the problem. “They represent themselves as an informational intermediary, but this is not true - they earn money on content, interfere with content, develop their own platforms,” said Akopov.

As for the elimination of broadcasts of TV companies from the main search engine, Yandex is not worried about this problem. Representatives of the company have already managed to state that the legal service of watching a video of Yandex has several directions, and the online show of central TV channels is far from the main service. “Users can always find relevant video content for themselves, and advertisers - the ability to communicate with the audience. For example, users can learn news from videos in Yandex.News and Euronews and RBC channels, sport can be watched on Football channel and in projects on sports broadcasts, and entertainment content can be seen on the new Yandex channels Comedies and Cartoons, “as well as in a large library of cinema and serials,” commented on the situation in the company's press service.

In June of this year, several well-known representatives of the media sphere, including Leonid Agronov, general director of the National Federation of Music Industry, Alexey Birdin, general director of the Internet Video Association, director of the Association of Film and Television Producers Sergei Selyanov, and Media-Communication Union President Pavel Stepanov, wrote a letter to the general director "Yandex" Arkady Volozhu. The essence of the letter - please remove from the search results links to pirated resources. “We urge Yandex to use all available methods to detect illegal content and eliminate it from both search results and Yandex’s applications and services,” the letter says .

According to experts, the departure of TV channels from cooperation with the search engine is not quite a logical move, and even more so - not a market one. The fight against piracy is, first of all, not a ban, but the development and implementation of affordable and high-quality platforms for the distribution of legal video.