State Duma approves 1st read of bill to block pirate sites’ mirrors

MOSCOW, Mar 20 (PRIME) -- Russia’s State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, has approved the first reading of a bill allowing the communications service to quickly block “mirrors” of pirate Web sites, business daily Vedomosti reported on Monday.

The bill, containing amendments to the anti-piracy law, is aimed at preventing an illegal distribution and use of audio visual works in the Internet. The amendments introduce a term of “a derived site in the Internet” and determine an order of a pre-trial limitation of access to such resources.

The document also forces search engines, like Yandex and Google, to delete from search results links to eternally blocked pirate sites. The engines have done it before, but rights’ owners were unsatisfied with the applied measures, since the deletion process takes time, while pirate sites can gain a new audience thanks to Hollywood blockbusters.

The bill was crafted by the Communications and Mass Media Ministry to carry out instructions given in February 2016 by a government council on the development of the local cinema industry.

It is a third version of amendments to the anti-piracy law, which has been in force since 2013. At first, the regulation stipulated a simple blocking of sites with unlicensed content, but it seemed insufficient for rights’ owners. A year later, a second version was adopted to close the resources forever, if court found them guilty of violating intellectual property rights twice.

To become law, the bill must be approved by the State Duma in two more readings and by the Federation Council, the parliament’s upper house, in one reading before being signed by the president.

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