From the beginning of 2022, Yandex.Video will only index videos from hosting sites that have entered into anti-piracy agreements with the company. Now they have been signed by Rutube and NTV, in the process of signing – Megogo and “Moscow 24”. However, VK Video was not satisfied with the new conditions.
The policy update will be the next step in the anti-piracy memorandum.
According to a document signed by copyright holders and search engines on November 1, 2018, the company is obliged to remove links to pirated resources from search results out of court. Since then, the search engine has already removed more than 24 million links to content, writes Kommersant.
At the moment, Yandex.Video shows about 30 video players from other sites in the search results. At the end of 2020, the largest third-party video players by views were YouTube, Rutube, Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, Mail.ru.
VK Video does not intend to enter into an agreement with Yandex and is working to open access to video content “without the help of search engines.” The company said that after the launch of the unified VK Video platform over the past week, they recorded multiple declines in video views from Yandex.
By changing its policy in this way, Yandex creates risks of a repetition of the situation with the “sorcerers” and another round of confrontation with the FAS, experts say.