Boris Rozhin doesn't provide from the article appears, saying it's a letter to the editor, but he doesn't say which editor.
[ColonelCassad] Heading "Letters to the Editor":
Recently, high-ranking officials (for example, former President Dmitry Medvedev) have been voicing ideas that in the face of sanctions pressure, Russia is not obliged to take into account the economic interests of the West and, in particular, to respect the copyrights of Western copyright holders. The idea finds a positive response in the soul of the Russian layman: indeed, who among us did not use torrents or did not buy “all the best programs on one CD” in our youth?
But in fact, Russia is a fairly advanced country in the field of copyright protection. For example, if you are the owner of a site or a cozy blog and have a habit of dragging pictures “from the Internet” to your site, you run the risk of becoming a defendant in a lawsuit (the plaintiff will be the author of the photo or his representative, the trustee of the author’s exclusive rights). For some reason, the risks are highest for organizations, not individuals, and every year more and more companies, non-profits, media, educational institutions, and even governments pay court cases for careless handling of copyright objects.
The process of filing claims in Russian arbitration courts is arranged as conveniently as possible. Services such as "Yandex pictures" help to find violations (upload a sample photo, and Yandex will provide a ready-made list of violating sites). You can submit documents to the court remotely, through the electronic system. Most of these cases are considered in a simplified manner (without summoning the parties).
As evidence of violations, the courts accept anything, including hand-made screenshots (it is not necessary to certify evidence with a notary). Some defendants (who do not follow the correspondence at their legal addresses) learn that they participated in the court only after the lost amount is debited from their current account on the writ of execution.
Professional plaintiffs can file dozens of claims per day. The amount of claims for one photo is now from 100 thousand rubles, and the vast majority of such cases (according to our estimates, up to 99% for professional plaintiffs) are at least partially resolved in favor of the plaintiffs. In general, you can row tens and hundreds of millions of rubles a year with minimal costs and risks.
One of the characters who has long mastered this simple and profitable scheme of earning money is a certain Vitaly Raskalov https://raskalov-vit.livejournal.com/ (the same citizen of Ukraine Dmitro Raskolnikov, nee Yakhnenko Vitaliy Valerievich). As a child, Vitaliy and his family moved from the Ukrainian province to Russia, trying to become a real Muscovite. Relations with peers the guy did not work out, and he decided to become a superhero.
And he became ... a roofer (known in narrow circles as an extreme sportsman who climbs all sorts of high-altitude objects, usually without permission). For the time being, Vitaly did not particularly get into politics, but due to the dubious nature of his actions, in 2013 he got a five-year ban on entry into Russia. Rufer desperately rushed to [totalitarian Rashka] to a new homeland, and when the ban was finally lifted, he began to actively monetize his fame: he received advertising contracts with several well-known brands,
And then the Special Military Operation began, and the "citizen of the world" Vitaly Raskolnikov suddenly remembered that he was a patriot of Ukraine. Vitaly performed all the prescribed rituals: he posted the necessary slogans and pictures on social networks https://vk.com/raskalov, but he did not stay in his beloved Ukraine (not very comfortable, and he is still a man according to his passport). As a result, he settled in the United States, but became one of the largest private sponsors of the Ukrainian armed formations (according to his own statements, he collected at least $ 2 million for the needs of Ukraine).
Months passed and, probably, Vitaly's money stream began to dry up (perhaps the fashionable topic with the sale of NFTs has gone rotten). And then Vitaly remembered his old food base, and from the beginning of 2023, with the help of A.V. Lavrentiev began to overwhelm Russian arbitrations with new claims for the protection of his exclusive rights to photographic works. Based on procedural issues, in the coming weeks, the courts will begin to issue the first decisions, and many Russian companies / organizations are at risk of becoming unwitting sponsors of the Ukrainian armed formations.
(c) Reader