As Russian media sources air reports about VKontakte (VK.com), Russia’s largest social network, getting rid of its illegal music content, VK.com itself denies any widespread purges, mollifying user protests with a ‘business as usual’ sort of message.
“VKontakte, facing the imminent adoption of Russia’s anti-piracy law, is busy removing its illegal music content – perhaps,” Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported last Friday, citing Robert Shlegel, a member of the anti-piracy legislative working group of the State Duma, the lower chamber of Russian Parliament.
The source quoted anonymous VKontakte user reports about finding notifications that their favorite music “has been removed from public access following a request from the copyright holder.” This has been interpreted as the network’s across-the-board ‘war on piracy.’
On Sunday afternoon, VKontakte denied the rumors. Georgy Lobushkin, a spokesman for the network, published a post on his VK.com page, informing users that “we are not going to remove music in its entirety; nor are we barring access to foreign-only or Russian-only content, rock or pop alike. We will remove specific tracks by specific singers…We have always removed audio and video files following legitimate complaints from copyright holders.”
Most music tracks “will remain on the website,” the spokesman emphasized, adding that “there’s a great deal of music in the world, and nobody can ban others from listening to something, or impose preferences.”
“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest”
VKontakte does have a history of gross violations of copyright laws, enabling representative Shlegel to label the network “Russia’s most piratical resource” and causing Russian courts to refer to it as being “too passive” with regard to copyright infringement.
EWDN has closely followed VK.com’s most notorious legal saga with Gala Records, the first private record label in Russia, which culminated this past May in a court upholding all of Gala’s claims for damages from VKontakte shortly after the network refused to pay any damages and appealed prior court decisions.
The U.S. Trade Representative has repeatedly identified VK.com as “one of the world’s hotbeds of piracy.”
Russia sets the stage for an anti-piracy assault; the online industry sidelined
The Russian State Duma adopted the new anti-piracy bill unanimously in its first hearing last Friday, just hours after Shlegel had advised VKontakte to “think of how to sell content and ink contracts with copyright holders, like YouTube does.”
Russian business daily Kommersant underscored in its Saturday report that this controversial new legislation, which gives law enforcement the green light to block websites even prior to any court rulings, had been opposed by the leading Russian Internet companies, including Yandex, Mail.ru Group, and Google Russia, as well as by the Russian Association for Electronic Communications.
The legislators promised Friday to take the industry’s opinion into account. Many doubt they will have enough time to do so; the deadline for revising the document is this Wednesday.
