The London-based anti-piracy company MUSO has signed a landmark agreement with VK.com, which with 250 million users is the second most visited site in Russia and seen as an alternative to Facebook.
The problem for rights is that the site is also widely used as a portal to allow free and easy access to one of the world’s largest archives of unlicensed music and video, with a reported 77% of files being unauthorized.
This, in turn, has had a huge impact across the global music industry, costing rights owners up to $1billion (€749.7 million).
The agreement between MUSO and VK.com will affect European and other global rights owners and see the removal of hundreds of mp3 sites that are freely making available their entire audio library to 32 million people via VK.com.
MUSO describes itself as an independent alternative to the IFPI and works with over 1,000 media companies globally.
