IFPI welcomes copyright ruling against VKontakte

London, 31 January 2012

IFPI welcomes a landmark ruling by a Russian court that internet company vKontakte's music service is liable for copyright infringement. The commercial ("Arbitrazh") Court of Saint Petersburg ruled that the social networking site with an unlicensed music service is illegally offering unlicensed music to its users.

Reacting to the judgment, IFPI CEO, Frances Moore, said: "This is a very important ruling for Russia. It shows that sites like vKontakte cannot build a business on making music available without licences from content owners. Such services are directly liable for the unlicensed music they make available. They cannot avoid liability by shifting responsibility on to their users."

Frances Moore added that: "Russia is a market with the potential to develop a thriving legitimate music market, but this prospect is currently being undermined by unlicensed services such as vKontakte. Millions of unlicensed songs are freely available through vKontakte, competing unfairly with licensed services, and this must stop."

Background on the case

The case against vKontakte was brought by SBA Music Publishing and SBA Production, members of the Gala Music Group in Russia. The cases were based on vKontakte making Gala's music compositions and sound recordings available without licensing agreements. Several further cases are pending.

Background on vKontakte

vKontakte is Russia's most popular online entertainment platform. It has over 110 million registered users and over 33 million users per day, and is one of the top 50 most visited sites in the world, attracting more traffic than BBC Online or CNN.com. vKontakte itself claims to be responsible for more than half of all internet traffic in CIS countries.

The unlicensed vKontakte music service allows streaming of music from an extensive catalogue of Russian and international sound recordings and encourages software developers to create apps for illegal downloading of content via vKontakte.

Russia is now one of Europe's biggest online markets. vKontakte is a business valued at between US$1.5 and US$3 billion, and it is built on the back of content which they are not licensed to use.

For further information contact:
Daniel Friedlaender, IFPI European Office
Email: daniel.friedlaender@ifpi.org
Tel: +32 (0)2 511 9208

Adrian Strain, IFPI London
Email: Adrian.strain@ifpi.org
Tel: +44 (0)20 7878 7935