The US provider will stand trial before the Russian right owners.
The companies “NTV-Plus”, Megogo and “Volga” filed a lawsuit to the Moscow City Court against the US service CloudFlare, as reported by the “Izvestiya”. The reason for the complaint was unlicensed content put on pirate platforms representing the hosting provider’s customers.
This service speeds up page loading of any resource for users. According to the “Roskomsvoboda” Association, 30% of IP-addresses blocked throughout the Russian Federation belong to the CloudFlare. We shall recall that the non-governmental organization previously attempted to prove the illegality of the life-term locking of the largest Runet platform Rutracker.org.
According to Victor Chernov, CEO at Megogo, the US provider acts as an information agent, conferring offenders the right to put unlicensed content online. In its lawsuit the company demands to cease granting technological capacities to pirate resources, which put and provide access to the content without copyright.
As pointed out by Anastasia Sergeeva representing the film distribution company “Volga”, it is more efficient today to file lawsuits against providers, rather than resources themselves, as it is usually hard if not impossible to find any information about the site’s owners. According to her, it is the service CloudFlare that is used by platforms like kinokrik.net, kinokrad.net, o-nline.ws, kinokong.net, kinoprosmotr.net and dream-film.net, to which the right holders have a claim. If under the court ruling the hosting provider does not lock the resource with unlicensed content, the company will resort to the Roskomnadzor.
According to the “Roskomsvobody”’s representative, the complexity of banning the CloudFlare in Russia is that the service’s IP-addresses are constantly changing. Therefore, it is not clear what the agency will block, i.e. IPs of offending sites or of the hosting provider’s ones.
