Page 8 - RusRPTDec18

2.0 Politics
2.1 Russian online companies sign off on anti-piracy mechanism
Russian TV holdings, online streaming services, and largest content producers signed an anti-piracy memorandum on November 1, with the biggest achievement being the commitment of internet major Yandex to remove links with pirated content from its search results.
Previously in September Yandex did not admit to facilitating privacy and planned to continue legal proceedings against state media giant Gazprom Media that earlier forced Yandex to remove links to pirated content from its search engine.
The courts threatened to block Yandex’s site -- the first time a large-scale blocking of one of Russia's leading Internet players had been threatened -- over the piracy accusations. Russia is the second biggest consumer of digital pirated content in the world with 20.6bn visits to pirate sites in 2017.
Vedomosti daily reminds that revenues from legal video content consumption grew by 48% in the first half of 2018 to RUB10.3bn, as estimated by J’son & Partners Consulting, but rights holders still claim that piracy causes widespread losses. The owner of Rambler Group Alexandrer Mamuth claimed that in 2017 piracy caused RUB70bn ($1.1bn) losses to rights holders.
Reportedly Yandex insisted that all largest online players need to participate in the signing of the memorandum, making the participation of Mail.ru Group and Rambler Group crucial.
Rights holders were represented by the First Channel, VGTRK broadcasters, Gazprom Media, National Media Group, STS Media, Association of Internet- Video (uniting streaming services), and Association of TV and Cinema producers. Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor is the guarantor of the agreement.
According to the memorandum, a database of links to pirated content will be created and search engines will have to run search requests by the database every 5 minutes and remove illegal links within six hours. Independent content providers who are not part of the memorandum will have a separate procedure of adding allegedly pirated content links to the database.
The model is based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) according to which Google removes pirated content from search results.
2.2 US, Russia battle for world’s biggest oil producer title
The US crude oil production set another all time high after an increase of 0.4mmb/d week over week in the two week period to November 2 to 11.6mmb/d, the highest level ever, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
“The US has become the largest crude oil producer in the world, outpacing Russia, according to the EIA data. Crude production in Russia reached 11.36mmb/d in October,” VTB Capital (VTBC) said in a note.
The US already overtook Russia to become the world’s biggest producer of oil in August, but Russia was expected to win back the lead in the coming months. However, the pace of growth of US production has accelerated. Russia has been the biggest single producer of oil in terms of barrels produced a day for several years, but the shale oil revolution in the US has seen production there skyrocket in recent years.
8 RUSSIA Country Report December 2018 www.intellinews.com