Russian Court Sentences Pirate Website Owner to Two Years in Prison

• A court in Moscow becomes the first one ever to convict a Russian pirate over copyright infringement.
• The man was arrested in spring and confessed that he owned and operated three pirating domains.
• The piracy scene in Russia is going through difficult times after major CDNs were shut down, and the attention passed to streamers.

The Kransogorsk City Court in Moscow has sentenced a man named “Stanislav Saigin” to two years in prison after the man was convicted for offenses of copyright infringement. This is the very first time that a court in Russia has convicted someone due to piracy, so judicial history was made. Stanislav Saigin, however, is not just a casual pirate, nor even one of the hundreds if not thousands of pirate website owners. He was a “whale” in the local copyright-infringing community and a person who caused significant damage to the legitimate business of rightsholders.

More specifically, Mr. Saigin owned the ‘Kinogb.guru’, ‘kinokot.biz’, and ‘fosa.me’ websites, which were enjoying the support of dozens of mirror sites each. These platforms offered thousands of films and TV series episodes to the public free of charge. The content to these three streaming domains was provided by the Moonwalk CDN, which was taken down in October after ACE, BREIN, and the MPA managed to take successful coordinated action against it. Moonwalk had a deal with websites like Kinogb, paying them $0.6 per 1000 views, and that is why Saigin’s platforms didn’t charge the visitors anything. In addition to the Moonwalk deal, Saigin also pushed ads from online casinos, so he made revenue this way too.

According to details provided by Group-IB, who carried out an investigation on Stanislav Saigin, the man tried to be cautious instead of publicly promoting his services as others do. So, he doesn’t have any social media accounts, was not posting links to his on platforms on pirating forums, and generally tried his best not to leave an electronic trace. Still, the authorities managed to track him down and arrest him in the spring of 2019, with the man confessing his wrongdoings immediately. Later, on the court, he decided not to plead guilty, but a two-year suspended sentence and three years on probation were still handed.

With all that is going on lately in Russia, piracy in the country has taken a considerable and measurable blow. According to Group-IB estimates, 2019 was the first year to see a pirate market shrink by 27% compared to 2018. This is a huge percentage, and while piracy may be far from being dead, it is definitely going through rough times right now. Certainly, the prosecution of S. Saigin will further damage the community and scare the streaming website owners and operators.

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