Pirate Pay, a startup from Perm, and Ajatix, another one from Volgograd, have both received grant funding from the Microsoft Seed Finance Fund. The fund aims to provide direct financial support to startups in the areas of software and SaaS services. The fund was created in November 2010 in partnership with Skolkovo, the state sponsored innovation hub under construction near Moscow.
Recognized last month as Russia’s “best startup” under the program, Pirate Pay was awarded a $100,000 grant. In contrast to a number of existing solutions combating piracy that focus on monitoring web content and identifying and repressing copyright abusers, Pirate Bay offers a preventive approach focused on blocking illegal downloading of video, music or software from bit torrent networks.
Pirate Pay’s control modules match user requests with a database of protected content. Should requested content appear to be copyrighted, the tracker will automatically block IP addresses indicating such content is available for downloading. ISPs need only install Pirate Pay software and then all downloads of copyrighted media files via these ISPs will be detected and IP addresses of seeders blocked. Detection of illegal content, based on heuristic algorithms, is completely automatic.
Dmitry Shuvaev, Pirate Pay’s development director, suggested making all ISPs legally obliged to install their software.
Ajatix, a designer innovative web development tools, was the second startup to benefit from Microsoft’s program. It received a $30,000 grant in early April.
Sources: Pirate Pay, Computerra.ru, CNews.ru, Microsoft, Allventure.ru
