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Russia blocks Premier League broadcasts by Amazon's Twitch over lawsuit

63 points by omgtehlion 7y ago

acqq 7y ago
(Edit: the following was written as the post linked to some source which was Google Translated) Reading to the end, the title is as on HN is wrong (edited and it doesn't include the last update). The last paragraph there is now: "Updating publication # 3: According to TASS, Mikhail Gershkovich, sports project manager at Rambler Group, said: “At the moment, negotiations are ongoing with Twitch to sign a settlement agreement. The service gave us the tools to combat pirated broadcasts, and now we are only talking about compensation for damage caused from August to November 2019. "It turns out that the sum of the claims in the Rambler Group lawsuit was proposed by an external attorney in charge of the case. “The amount is technical and the maximum possible, it will be clarified,” concluded Gershkovich."
drawkbox 7y ago
> According to the information of the newspaper Kommersant, Rambler Group demands through the court to “stop the spread of pirated broadcasts” and to recover a record 180 billion rubles. (about $ 2.9 billion) from the world's largest streaming service Twitch. Yulianna Tabastaeva, a representative of Twitch in court, announced that the requirements of the Rambler Group, in addition to paying compensation, also include a complete blocking of the Twitch service for users in Russia. We are fully into the state/corporate/mafia extortion and authoritarian phase of the internet and technology. I miss the old internet that was anti-authoritarian and still growing creating value. The internet and technology around it has peaked, value creation phases nearly complete, value extraction phase underway. Next step a breakup of the worldwide united internet union and more value extraction along borders and corporate tribes requiring bribes.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  This is not about 'authoritarian control' whatever that might mean, it's "just" about copyright enforcement - specifically, media rights over English Premier League matches, of all things. Claims that some comparatively-trivial copyright violation accounts for "billions of dollars" in economic impact are nothing new.
  - drawkbox 7y ago
    This particular case is mostly corporate but also authoritarian. It presses and seeds the point that Russia wants their own internet and there be these type of deals having to be made to access it. [1] China already does this type of "business", controlling their markets. The internet is also regularly shut down by authoritarians in their respective states. We are definitely in the authoritarian phase of the internet. As the internet took over markets, politics and more, it was inevitable. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-05/vladimir-putin-wants-his-own-internet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-05/vladimir-...
    - bencollier49 7y ago
      If you'd bought the rights to rebroadcast an incredibly popular series of sporting events, and no-one was subscribing because they were watching the stuff online for free, what would you do about it?
      - drawkbox 7y ago
        I don't approve of extorting all of Twitch for one companies corporate copyrights including blocking Twitch across an entire country. This is a scorched earth corporate authoritarian/oligopoly approach. Not a fan of these types of blanket Moltov cocktail extortions that affect 99% of all people using the service normally. Also, it strangely targets a property of a large American company that they do not like in Amazon. This is opening up for more of this only. Probably the beginning of fully blocking streaming on foreign sites as there is lots of money in it now. Basically the China market control approach that helps again with the authoritarianism. There is copyright / pirating all over the internet in every country. Would you approve of shutting it all down because someone is leeching? Ultimately people that watch streams / pirate means that the original product is either badly priced, inaccessible or the user can't afford it anyways. Most people that can afford these things will pay eventually. There have been studies on piracy being mostly people that would never pay at that time. Further, in the end pirates turn into people that buy more content [1]. Easily accessible products that are easier than piracy use the market to reduce it. [2] Tuning products to stop a small percentage of users will lead us to tyranny of markets and horrible product experiences for paying customers which will then either pirate [3] or tune out. [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pirates-tend-to-be-the-biggest-buyers-of-legal-content https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-... [2]https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/26/2233257/studies-keep-showing-that-the-best-way-to-stop-piracy-is-to-offer-cheaper-better-alternatives https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/26/2233257/studies-keep... [3] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html
- glandium 7y ago
  We are fully into the state/corporate/mafia extortion and authoritarian phase of the internet and technology. And even Google is playing this game, cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800968
bhhaskin 7y ago
This link is giving me a ssl error on both Firefox and chrome on Android. Bad cert domain.
- Thorrez 7y ago
  www.reuters.com ? It loads for me in both Firefox and Chrome on Android. The SSL labs report looks good, in particular it includes good trust chains for all browsers/operating systems. What IP does it resolve to for you? Is it possible you're being MITMed? What certificate is being presented to you? https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.reuters.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.reuters.c...
  - bhhaskin 7y ago
    The link was changed it was pointing to a Google doc link of some kind.
- cygned 7y ago
  Also untrusted on iOS resulting in an error.
- iaml 7y ago
  Works fine on firefox desktop/safari ios.
pepemon 7y ago
This is the same company that threatens Igor Sysoev and Moscow NGINX office.
- drawkbox 7y ago
  Once Is Chance, Twice is Coincidence, Third Time Is A Pattern Looks like this may be a policy either at the oligopoly/oligarch, corporate or authoritarian state level. I'd argue that twice is already a pattern.
  - mapcars 7y ago
    Some people linked to it few years ago took over one of big businesses in Russia threatening it's owner and forcing him out of the country. So it's 3, or at least 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroset
- ddevault 7y ago
  They sent legal threats to my now-defunct MediaCrush project, too.
varelaz 7y ago
I wouldn't link this with nginx pursue. Rambler is very big company (something like Yahoo in Russian) and in this case claim looks reasonable. Off course amount looks shocking high, but as it was mentioned it's maximum possible and likely at the end it will be 1000 times smaller. It's kind of red marker for Twitch to react faster, nothing else.
- gritzko 7y ago
  Rambler is an intellectual-property remnant of a big internet company. A troll.
  - orthoxerox 7y ago
    So, something like Yahoo?
- pepemon 7y ago
  NGINX is valued more than Rambler, what kind of company's size are you talking about?
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
It's Rambler Rampage week! First, Nginx, now Twitch. By Friday I expect them to call a FSB raid on Yandex offices for taking their share of internet search market in early 00s.
ga-vu 7y ago
Normally, companies would go after the users committing the copyright infringement, not the platform. This is just a money-grab. Similar to how they went after NGINX.
tw04 7y ago
Hey look, the same guys who went after nginx. This just tells me all those sanctions on Russian billionaires is working and they're looking for an avenue to strike back at the West.

63 points by omgtehlion 7y ago

acqq 7y ago

(Edit: the following was written as the post linked to some source which was Google Translated) Reading to the end, the title is as on HN is wrong (edited and it doesn't include the last update). The last paragraph there is now: "Updating publication # 3: According to TASS, Mikhail Gershkovich, sports project manager at Rambler Group, said: “At the moment, negotiations are ongoing with Twitch to sign a settlement agreement. The service gave us the tools to combat pirated broadcasts, and now we are only talking about compensation for damage caused from August to November 2019. "It turns out that the sum of the claims in the Rambler Group lawsuit was proposed by an external attorney in charge of the case. “The amount is technical and the maximum possible, it will be clarified,” concluded Gershkovich."

drawkbox 7y ago

> According to the information of the newspaper Kommersant, Rambler Group demands through the court to “stop the spread of pirated broadcasts” and to recover a record 180 billion rubles. (about $ 2.9 billion) from the world's largest streaming service Twitch. Yulianna Tabastaeva, a representative of Twitch in court, announced that the requirements of the Rambler Group, in addition to paying compensation, also include a complete blocking of the Twitch service for users in Russia. We are fully into the state/corporate/mafia extortion and authoritarian phase of the internet and technology. I miss the old internet that was anti-authoritarian and still growing creating value. The internet and technology around it has peaked, value creation phases nearly complete, value extraction phase underway. Next step a breakup of the worldwide united internet union and more value extraction along borders and corporate tribes requiring bribes.

zozbot234 7y ago
This is not about 'authoritarian control' whatever that might mean, it's "just" about copyright enforcement - specifically, media rights over English Premier League matches, of all things. Claims that some comparatively-trivial copyright violation accounts for "billions of dollars" in economic impact are nothing new.
- drawkbox 7y ago
  This particular case is mostly corporate but also authoritarian. It presses and seeds the point that Russia wants their own internet and there be these type of deals having to be made to access it. [1] China already does this type of "business", controlling their markets. The internet is also regularly shut down by authoritarians in their respective states. We are definitely in the authoritarian phase of the internet. As the internet took over markets, politics and more, it was inevitable. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-05/vladimir-putin-wants-his-own-internet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-05/vladimir-...
  - bencollier49 7y ago
    If you'd bought the rights to rebroadcast an incredibly popular series of sporting events, and no-one was subscribing because they were watching the stuff online for free, what would you do about it?
    - drawkbox 7y ago
      I don't approve of extorting all of Twitch for one companies corporate copyrights including blocking Twitch across an entire country. This is a scorched earth corporate authoritarian/oligopoly approach. Not a fan of these types of blanket Moltov cocktail extortions that affect 99% of all people using the service normally. Also, it strangely targets a property of a large American company that they do not like in Amazon. This is opening up for more of this only. Probably the beginning of fully blocking streaming on foreign sites as there is lots of money in it now. Basically the China market control approach that helps again with the authoritarianism. There is copyright / pirating all over the internet in every country. Would you approve of shutting it all down because someone is leeching? Ultimately people that watch streams / pirate means that the original product is either badly priced, inaccessible or the user can't afford it anyways. Most people that can afford these things will pay eventually. There have been studies on piracy being mostly people that would never pay at that time. Further, in the end pirates turn into people that buy more content [1]. Easily accessible products that are easier than piracy use the market to reduce it. [2] Tuning products to stop a small percentage of users will lead us to tyranny of markets and horrible product experiences for paying customers which will then either pirate [3] or tune out. [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pirates-tend-to-be-the-biggest-buyers-of-legal-content https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-... [2]https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/26/2233257/studies-keep-showing-that-the-best-way-to-stop-piracy-is-to-offer-cheaper-better-alternatives https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/26/2233257/studies-keep... [3] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html
glandium 7y ago
We are fully into the state/corporate/mafia extortion and authoritarian phase of the internet and technology. And even Google is playing this game, cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800968

bhhaskin 7y ago

This link is giving me a ssl error on both Firefox and chrome on Android. Bad cert domain.

Thorrez 7y ago
www.reuters.com ? It loads for me in both Firefox and Chrome on Android. The SSL labs report looks good, in particular it includes good trust chains for all browsers/operating systems. What IP does it resolve to for you? Is it possible you're being MITMed? What certificate is being presented to you? https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.reuters.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.reuters.c...
- bhhaskin 7y ago
  The link was changed it was pointing to a Google doc link of some kind.
cygned 7y ago
Also untrusted on iOS resulting in an error.
iaml 7y ago
Works fine on firefox desktop/safari ios.

pepemon 7y ago

This is the same company that threatens Igor Sysoev and Moscow NGINX office.

drawkbox 7y ago
Once Is Chance, Twice is Coincidence, Third Time Is A Pattern Looks like this may be a policy either at the oligopoly/oligarch, corporate or authoritarian state level. I'd argue that twice is already a pattern.
- mapcars 7y ago
  Some people linked to it few years ago took over one of big businesses in Russia threatening it's owner and forcing him out of the country. So it's 3, or at least 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroset
ddevault 7y ago
They sent legal threats to my now-defunct MediaCrush project, too.

varelaz 7y ago

I wouldn't link this with nginx pursue. Rambler is very big company (something like Yahoo in Russian) and in this case claim looks reasonable. Off course amount looks shocking high, but as it was mentioned it's maximum possible and likely at the end it will be 1000 times smaller. It's kind of red marker for Twitch to react faster, nothing else.

gritzko 7y ago
Rambler is an intellectual-property remnant of a big internet company. A troll.
- orthoxerox 7y ago
  So, something like Yahoo?
pepemon 7y ago
NGINX is valued more than Rambler, what kind of company's size are you talking about?

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

It's Rambler Rampage week! First, Nginx, now Twitch. By Friday I expect them to call a FSB raid on Yandex offices for taking their share of internet search market in early 00s.

ga-vu 7y ago

Normally, companies would go after the users committing the copyright infringement, not the platform. This is just a money-grab. Similar to how they went after NGINX.

tw04 7y ago

Hey look, the same guys who went after nginx. This just tells me all those sanctions on Russian billionaires is working and they're looking for an avenue to strike back at the West.