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Month: May 2019

Uber, Gett and Bolt can be forced out of Russian internal market

The Russian legislators have decided to regulate the taxi market in Russia. They have drafted and proposed new law on taxi state regulation in Russia. The cruelest provision of this draft law is the restriction of market opportunities for foreign companies, i.e. for taxi aggregators like Uber, Gett and Bolt. Almost everybody knows that the absence of competition leads to market degradation, but the Russian legislators don’t care about it, they believe they can change the laws of economy.

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Commission sends Statements of Objections to Valve and five videogame publishers on “geo-blocking” of PC video games

The European Commission has informed Valve, owner of the “Steam” video game distribution platform, and five videogame publishers, of its preliminary view that the companies prevented consumers from purchasing videogames cross-border from other Member States, in breach of EU competition rules.

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SWD Impact assessment on the modernisation of EU copyright rules – impacts of baseline option for the use of protected content by online services

Impact on creative industries’ and right holders’ capacity to control better the availability of their content on user uploaded content services and thereby negotiate with the services the conditions of such use: as the implementation by the services of technologies, such as content identification technologies, will remain voluntary and based on the terms set by the services, it is likely that the baseline scenario will not lead to improvements for rightholders who are likely to continue having difficulties to enter into negotiations and/or negotiate fair terms for the use of their content.

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Third edition of USA copyright office compendium – application tips for sound recording copyright registration

If the applicant intends to register (draft) a sound recording or a sound recording combined with the underlying musical work, dramatic work, or literary work embodied in that recording, the applicant must select “Sound Recording” when completing the online application or must use Form SR when completing a paper application.

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Russian Facebook VKontakte intends to settle copyright infringement lawsuit

Many Russian right holders have tried to “punish” Russian popular social network VKontakte – Russian Facebook – for copyright infringement. Users of this social network like Vkontakte because you can get satisfaction for your taste in music, video or even books. But in most cases right holders failed because Vkontakte’s position is always the same – “we are only informational intermediary”, therefore “we are not liable if the user posts or links to any illegal content”, “we can only takedown such content in our network”.

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Russian patent service does not want to have competitor in its field of activity

Russian ministry of communication has drafted new presidential decree on establishment of new public state organisation – Russian intellectual property center. The organisation is to be established with aim to improve state policy in the field of intellectual property, consolidation of state and civil society efforts for development of IP market and increasing of export potential in the terms of shifting to digital economy.

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Right holders are dissatisfied by Yandex’s execution of antipiracy memo

Major Russian right holders, holding rights in audio-visual works, and Yandex have signed anti-piracy memorandum, the agreement aiming to delete links or pirate web-sites from search results. In order to execute this memo Yandex have developed its own bot – special software searching for illegal sources of right holders’ content. The bot is not only means of memo execution, but the main, and right holders, who signed this memo, are dissatisfied on its work.

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Pirates lose their ad money thanks to VPN?

VPN allows circumventing geographical restriction of access to certain web-site if it is blocked. But most web-sites, including those “pirate”, rely on advertising; their most part of revenue is derived from advertising. One informational agency spoke with operator of one so called pirate site. What exactly distributes such site it is unknown, but the operator says some interesting things.

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New financial conditions for touring of Russian theaters

Russian ministry of culture (MinCult) has changed the financial conditions for touring. The new federal agenda “Major touring” include new criterion defining financial support allocated to Russian theaters in order to help the bear costs associated with touring. For example, new rules preclude opportunity to fly in business class and receive fixed royalties for each performance. The business class will be available only honored artists (so called people’s artist) and art directors.

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