At the international educational conference Distant & Digital, the session "Digital content: practical steps to counter piracy" was held. The participants came to conclusion that Russia, unlike many other countries, quite effectively opposes to pirate traffic in the Internet, but the pandemic has made its negative contribution to change of culture of content consumption by users.
Nikita Danilov, General Director of the National Federation of Music Industry (NFMI), noted that illegal traffic has increased significantly since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in Russia.
"Pirates have taken away a significant share of revenue. Here are comparative figures. In 2019, the music market grew by 17% and reached 45 billion rubles. In 2020, when COVID-19 rumbled, the industry earned only 23 billion rubles, not only because of the cancellation of concerts, but also because of the increase in user interest in illegal sites. And only last year the slow growth started - the market volume amounted to 25 billion rubles", - said Danilov. He also said that the industry was most concerned about the migration of pirate traffic to applications, primarily to Telegram.
The participants of the session suggested to use additional mechanisms to counter pirates: measures to fight against re-registration of domains of illegal resources, blocking of payments to pirate sites, similarly to the ban of money transfer to online casinos, and restriction of access to such sites by telecom operators within the law on sovereign runet. Experts agreed that the signing of a new version of the anti-piracy memorandum and the forthcoming adoption of a federal law against piracy will make the protection of content accessible to all right holders.
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