In 2023, the Intellectual Property Enforcement Department of GPM Digital Innovations (part of Gazprom-Media Holding) discovered and succeeded in blocking more than 8.5 million Internet pages containing illegally posted content belonging to the holding company. This represents a 19.3% increase on the previous year.
More than 5.5 million links were removed from the Yandex search engine, and about 4.1 million more were removed from Google’s indexing, which is more than 29% higher than in 2022.
According to Pavel Rusakov, despite the fact that there is a year on year an increase in the number of pirated links, the optimization and development of protection processes, improvement of the quality of audiovisual products and increasing level of service of right holders’ platforms is leading to users increasingly giving preference to legal content.
In 2023, the most popular pirated Gazprom-Media Holding projects were: the final season of Realnye patsany, Bitva extrasensov, Zvezdy v Afrike, SuperIvanovy, Noble Detective, Mir! Druzhba! Zhvachka!, and the immutable Comedy Club. Content broadcast by the Match! TV channel group is also very popular.
In order to protect content, 923 lawsuits were initiated in the past year. That is 44.4% of all lawsuits in Russia to protect copyright and related rights to intellectual property on the Internet. In addition, 224 lawsuits with property claims were filed during the year, which is 74.7% of all lawsuits filed in the country for the copyright protection and related rights on the Internet for intellectual property with claims for compensation.