For the last 20 years the Russian government has been actively involved in squeezing pirated content from the legal field of the country. At first we saw millions of CDs of movies, music, games, and software turning into dust under the wheels of tractors. After that, the persecution of those who made pirated copies began, and as a result, officials began to follow businessmen more actively, demanding that they buy licensed software. In Russian reality, such a struggle often turned into a common extortion, when officials were ready to turn a blind eye to any violations for a bribe. All this was quite expected, but in the end the fight paid off.
In recent years, many residents have realized the benefits of subscribing to music services, and with the arrival of Netflix in Russia, it has become possible to watch movies in excellent quality without delays and lingering searches on torrents. This led to another surge in subscribers to the U.S. service, but became unavailable with the introduction of anti-Russian sanctions. Today it no longer makes sense to find out the reasons why large media holdings and tech corporations left the Russian market. If we look closely at the sharp drop in revenues of many of them, we can conclude that such a decision was a cold shower and caused doubts among investors. Well, Russian journalists record a huge increase in interest among ordinary users in pirated content.
For example, the online movie theater Zetflix provides free access to Netflix content. Statistics show that since the beginning of March, the number of requests to download the official client has increased by 400%. Thanks to this, in March alone, the number of users on the site increased by 25%, and the daily audience exceeds 180 thousand. At the same time, up to 500 thousand users a day visit the site during major releases. The number of unique IP addresses alone amounts to 4.5 million a month. It is worth noting that Zetflix is far from being the only such site, because there are both lesser-known competitors and torrents, which have already seen many times more fans of pirated content than was recorded at the end of February.
Experts say that one of the key obstacles to the spread of pirate services like Zetflix is the unclear policy of the state and domestic marketplace services. On the one hand, we hear about the need to comply with the law. But what kind of law can we talk about if the rights holders have withdrawn themselves? In this connection even in the State Duma there is an opinion about the need to expand parallel imports of Western software, films, games and music. Prosecution will be abolished, and certain cinemas will start showing films without official permission from the rights holders. How all this will be implemented is not yet clear, but in this case several important problems with legislation need to be solved.
The thing is that for many years a lot of acts fixing the rights of foreign companies for the content created by them have been created. The temptation to destroy it all in one fell swoop is great, but some officials think that Western producers of entertainment content and software will soon start coming back. In this case, it will be necessary to introduce prohibitive measures again. In short, there are no easy solutions, but our readers are no less concerned about the issue of access to games. Many gamers have been buying the titles they liked in specialized stores for years. Today there is no such opportunity, and Western publishers even put sticks in the wheels of Russian computer game lovers.
Even if you can buy a game, the foreign rights holders raise the price. And that’s not to mention the inability to pay directly. Some already switched to pirated content, others are just thinking about it. Do not forget that for most users it is much easier to pay than to search for free content on the Internet. Even before there were a lot of scammers on the web, and now the number of these guys has become many times higher, which jeopardizes the personal data and savings of fans of the Jolly Roger. Source.