Russian OTT services and TV channels are opposed a plan by the country’s Duma (Parliament) to use the content of foreign copyright holders without their permission.
According to Kommersant, they instead favour only giving access to such content to legal sites that had access to it before the start of hostilities in Ukraine.
Kommersant goes on to quote a letter from the Media Communications Union, which brings together such leading players in the industry as Channel One, Rostelecom, MTS, Tricolor, VGRTK and Gazprom-Media. It says that the plan violates the interests of specialised market participants and may lead to “the termination of their activities”.
“It also creates the risk of using this mechanism to legalise and popularise pirated resources, which will negatively affect domestic producers and owners of exclusive rights to content”.
As previously reported by Broadband TV News, Russia’s Ministry of Digital Transformation is considering unblocking sites that show unlicensed video content of Western companies that are no longer officially present in the country.
