Star Media to Lead Fight Against Piracy in Russia

Star Media, in an effort to fend off piracy, has developed its own system for removing links to illegal content to protect not only its rights but also that of its rightsholders.

With the help of this system, Star Media began protecting its catalog of more than 6,000 hours of films and series earlier this year. It has now concluded a contract with fellow film and TV producer and distributor PRIOR Group, and is in negotiations with other film market players for the access to the pre-trial protection against pirates. Star Media, which previously used third-party services to protect its productions, now expects to occupy one-third of the market.

Star Media, through its proposed contracts, offers its partners a cleanup of content hosted on social media by pirates. As a member of the Association of Television and Cinema Producers, Star Media signed a memorandum alongside other rightsholders to secure the pre-trial removal of links to illegally hosted content from the list of search results fetched by web search engines.

Maria Gercishnikova, VP of sales and international projects at Star Media, said: “Star Media is one of the largest producers and distributors in the Russian film market. Production of content is the main line of our business. Content protection has always been an important issue for us. Doing this was not easy up to last year’s signature of the memorandum. We had a department in the company that would clean up a small percentage of illegal links, but it was not possible to clean up completely the links to all of the company’s productions. The cost of such cleanup by third-party companies would never have paid off. Now, content protection may become another source of revenue. The price of the contract consists of the number of titles taken under protection, the amount of cleanup, the freshness of the productions (a film being distributed or a library production).”