Piracy in Ukraine is gaining momentum

Piracy in Ukraine hasn’t been shrinking; instead, it’s been growing a lot – now it has almost equaled the TV advertising market in size. Such opinion was voiced by Vladyslav Ryashin, general producer at StarMedia, during Summit of Media Leaders panel discussion, which took place in the course of KYIV MEDIA WEEK. It is worth noting that TV advertising market in Ukraine is estimated at 220-250 million USD.

Besides, in the opinion of ICTV director-president Oleksandr Bogutsky, now the control scheme over piracy has been broken. After the Law on Film Production Support was adopted, there was an expectation that fighting piracy will be simplified: say, when a content supplier or producer found their projects on some other website, he/she would only need to send a request for their removal. Then, if the website owner refused to act, the copyrighter could send the letter to the provider, and that organization would block the domain. Now, when since May 2017 State Service of Intellectual Property has ceased its activities, and its authority was instead given to the Ministry of Trade and Economic Development, there is no template of a letter which could be send to the providers in the said circumstances.