Draft legislation has been passed to the Russian parliament that would force search engines to remove pirate websites from their search results. In this case, websites failing to respond to takedown notices will be targeted first.


It is known well that search engines are accused of facilitating piracy all over the world. Copyright holders claim that when seeking out content, people often use search engines that can lead them to infringing content on pirate sites. Pirate content is too visible in search results, especially when it shows up in the first few pages of results. Content creators can solve this problem by submitting takedown notices, but this may appear an inefficient process.

As such, Russia is going to legislate against it. A draft bill has just been submitted to parliament, which will force search engines to remove specified pirate sites from their search results. The law was designed by the Ministry of Communications to force search companies to deindex websites failing to respond to takedown requests.

The most popular torrent tracker RuTracker will be the first target. Local Internet service providers blocked it following a court order, after it refused to remove around 320,000 torrents. RuTracker took this decision after running a poll among its users, who agreed that they could bypass the nation-wide ban (and successfully do this). As such, RuTracker is now “permanently” blocked, and now all of its pages may disappear from search results.

The draft legislation also targets counter-measures taken by websites in attempt to bypass ISP blockades – for example, buying new domains, using proxy sites or full-scale mirrors to keep going. Such options are referred to in the bill as “derivative sites” and can be blocked without extra court process.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.