Yandex Removes 6 Million Illegal Video & Audio Search Results

Two years ago Yandex and the largest copyright holders signed a Memorandum that helped create a protection mechanism for copyright holders of audiovisual content. The partners agreed to promptly search, check and remove illegal audio and video content from search results.

In March 2021, the total number of deleted links exceeded 15 million. Of these, 6 million were removed from search results in less than three months of this year.

The pirated content was posted on over 150,000 sites.

Yandex clarified that in the fight against illegal content, copyright holders play a key role – the owners of the rights to films, TV series, songs, sports content and other works. They check the search results and put in the register those links and sites that violate their copyright. These links disappear from Yandex search results within a few hours.

Maxim Zagrebin, the Head of Yandex search products has been quoted:

As a search engine, we do not know and cannot determine the legal status of content posted on third-party resources. Therefore, we are grateful to all copyright holders for joint work to combat piracy in Russia. We hope that an equally applicable anti-piracy law, which will take into account the interests of copyright holders of all content formats, will create the necessary legal basis for systematic work in this direction.

The most active copyright holders who submitted the most links to the register (data at the end of February 2021):

  • Star Media – 5.5 million
  • VGTRK – 2.7 million
  • KinoPoisk – 1.7 million
  • TNT-Teleset – 1 million
  • “A Serial” – 0.8 million
  • ivi – 0.7 million
  • Central Partnership – 0.5 million

The seven largest copyright holders filed a total of 12.3 million links, which is 82% of the entire registry. Most of all, the copyright holders asked to remove links to “Yolki”, “Pun village of fools”, “The Walking Dead”, “Comedy Club” and “According to the laws of wartime.”

Dan Taylor
Dan Taylor is an experienced SEO consultant and has worked with brands and companies on optimizing for Russia (and Yandex) for a number of years. Winner of the inaugural 2018 TechSEO Boost competition, webmaster at HreflangChecker.com and Sloth.Cloud, and founder of RussianSearchNews.com.