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

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-amazon-twitch/russia-blocks-premier-league-broadcasts-by-amazons-twitch-over-lawsuit-idUSKBN1YK0NN

by omgtehlion • 7 years ago

63 42 7 years ago

reuters.com

acqq• 7 years 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."

drawkbox6• 7 years 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.

zozbot2342• 7 years 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.

drawkbox6• 7 years 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-...

zzzcpan2• 7 years ago

This is not about 'authoritarian control' whatever that might mean, it's "just" about copyright enforcement

It is in Russia, it's more like an excuse to block Twitch. Sberbank, the parent company of Rambler, is also a Kremlin's right hand and has been doing this kind of stuff since forever. For example, this was the company to which Yandex was forced to sell the controlling "golden share".

paganel• 7 years ago

Yeah, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, after all reddit was pretty quick in getting rid of /r/soccestreams as soon as the PL people got on their backs, it looks like Twitch is in the same position. It so happens that in this case the people forcing them to fall into line and respect copyright law are close buddies with some bad people in Russia, but nobody is perfect. After all the money for those players' Lamborghinis [1] has to come from somewhere.

[1] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/sport/football/wayne...

glandium• 7 years 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

bhhaskin2• 7 years ago

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

cygned• 7 years ago

Also untrusted on iOS resulting in an error.

Thorrez• 7 years 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.c...

bhhaskin2• 7 years ago

The link was changed it was pointing to a Google doc link of some kind.

iaml• 7 years ago

Works fine on firefox desktop/safari ios.

pepemon2• 7 years ago

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

drawkbox6• 7 years 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• 7 years 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

ddevault• 7 years ago

They sent legal threats to my now-defunct MediaCrush project, too.

varelaz• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Rambler is an intellectual-property remnant of a big internet company. A troll.

orthoxerox• 7 years ago

So, something like Yahoo?

pepemon2• 7 years ago

NGINX is valued more than Rambler, what kind of company's size are you talking about?

Andrew_nenakhov• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

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

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