14 DAY TRIAL // The Russian anti-piracy law went into force on Thursday, August 1, and with it over 1,700 sites went on strike in protest.
The contents of the websites remained unavailable for users throughout the day, with blank homepages save for messages denouncing the law and links to the petition demanding to call off the legislation, RT reports.
While some services, such as music website Zaycev.net and online encyclopedia Lurkmore.to, joined the protest, others such as Mail.ru, the biggest e-mail service in Russia, kept their websites running, but spoke out against the new law.
Russia’s search engine Yandex had previously expressed its concerns with the law but ignored the strike on August 1.
The Pirate Party of Russia recently held a street rally against the law and called for “Black August,” asking people to avoid paying for any type of copyrighted content, including movie tickets.
The law that came into force on August 1 enables copyright holders to contact the websites that illegally distribute protected content directly or the state consumer watchdog. Within 3 days the websites have to block access to the files and keep them so until the court decides on the case.
If the sites do not comply with the order, ISPs can be pushed to block them entirely. However, if the copyright owner does not file a lawsuit within 15 days after the initial complaint, the block should be lifted.
The first lawsuit has already been filed by a movie distribution company, Cinema without Borders, targeting Russia’s largest social network, Vkontakte. However, the lawsuit was rejected as the company did not attach any documents proving their copyright claims.
However, it could be refiled with proper corrections added to the documents.
Everything happened so fast that Vkontakte didn’t even receive any notification concerning the alleged piracy.