Russian Police Raided NGINX Moscow Office, Detained Co-Founders

Russian law enforcement officers have raided the Moscow offices of Nginx—the company behind the world's second most popular web server software—over a copyright infringement complaint filed by Rambler, a Russian Internet portal and email service provider.

According to multiple reports from local media and social media, the police conducted searches and has also detained several employees of the company, including Igor Sysoev, the original developer of Nginx and Maxim Konovalov, another co-founder of the company.

Over 30% of the websites on the Internet today, including many of the world's most popular sites like Netflix and Twitch, run on the Nginx server.

Igor Sysoev created the Nginx web server in the early 2000s and open-sourced it in 2004, after which he founded the company Nginx in 2015 that has now been acquired by F5 Networks, an American technology company, for $ 670 million.

According to a copy of the complaint shared on Twitter, Rambler accused that Sysoev created the software while he was working as a system administrator for the company. Thus, Rambler claims to own the copyright of the application.

Seems like Rambler filled copyright claim to @isysoev regarding @nginx, nginx office under police raid (unconfirmed). Originally posted by @igorippolitov , but somebody asked him to remove his post. pic.twitter.com/76mBNtV31G

— Anton Nesterov (@AntNesterov) December 12, 2019

Rambler also claimed that Sysoev worked on the project during his working hours, and then later, he illegally distributed the program, causing Rambler to estimate the damage of 51.4 million rubles.

"Nginx is an official work, the development of which since the beginning of the 2000s in the framework of labor relations with Rambler, was carried out by Igor Sysoev," Rambler told a Russian media site.

"Therefore, any use of this program without the consent of the Rambler Group is a violation of the exclusive right."

However, during an interview with another Russian site in 2012, Sysoev confirmed that he indeed worked at Rumbler during the years when he started working on the project, but he created the Nginx program in his free time.

"It should be noted that programming was not part of my job responsibilities, but since there were time and traction, the first thing I did was adapt the patch to compress Apache responses," Sysoev said in that interview.

"Then, I was asked to deal with the mod_proxy module. I looked at it and decided it was easier to write everything from scratch than to adapt to some things there."

This case has now been filed under part 3 of Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of copyright and related rights).

Meanwhile, Nginx has not yet responded to The Hacker News emails or released any public statements on the situation.

This is a developing story. We will update this story when more information becomes available.

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