Is Ororo TV Legal? Ororo.tv’s ‘Legal Loophole’ Looked At

Ororo.tv is a streaming service based in Russia. It has pretty much all series and films of all major networks, as well as much smaller obscure stuff. It functions similar to Popcorn Time, but with Netflix-like quality. This seems great, but is Ororo.tv legal?

Too long didn’t read: Ororo.tv is probably not legal to watch, and the best way to deal with this is to either use a VPN for Ororo.tv or to get a fully legal alternative to Ororo.tv.

How Is Ororo.tv Legal?

Ororo.tv seems like it must be illegal due to copyright infringement.

After all, you’re streaming series from Netflix and HBO and such, and Ororo.tv is clearly not paying for the rights to stream these.

Otherwise Ororo.tv wouldn’t be so cheap.

But, Ororo.tv claims to be legal, due to a specific copyright law in Russia.

Ororo.tv Legal Loophole

Ororo.tv is clearly going for a loophole in the copyright act. On their website, they say the following:

Do you have the rights to the provided content?

Purpose of our website is aimed exclusively at teaching foreign languages through various audiovisual materials.

We allow to post videos on a fair-use base (article 1274 of the Civil Code in Russia), which means it is possible to use them ‘for educational purposes’ unless the right holder stated otherwise. If right holders decide to claim their videos back, they send a request and we fulfill it.

So Ororo.tv claims to be legal because they offer series and movies on Ororo tv for educational purposes, which is ‘fair use’ in Russia; which means that they can use materials that other people have copyrights on.

Since Ororo.tv is based in Russia, their streaming service may thus be technically legal.

So this legal loophole explains why the tagline or their homepage is ‘Fun way to learn English!’, instead of ‘Watch any movie or series for cheap on Ororo.tv‘.

Is Ororo.tv legal to watch in your country?

Even if Ororo.tv is technically legal in Russia, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s legal for you to watch Ororo.tv in your country.

I’m not a legal scholar, but if your country doesn’t have the same copyright exemption as Russia, doesn’t that mean that watching Ororo isn’t legal in your country?

I do know that Russia is not the only country with exemptions to copyrights for educational purposes. As this Quora answer explains, in India there’s a subsection in their copyright act that determines that educational content is not subject to the Copyright act.

I think this means that also in India, if Ororo.tv is educational content, it’s legal to watch.

However, suppose that you’re in Italy or Germany, which don’t have the same copyright laws as Russia: is Ororo.tv then legal to watch in Germany?

I don’t know. I don’t have an international law degree, so I don’t know which laws count in such a case.

I also don’t know how common it is for countries to exempt educational content from copyright law.

Furthermore, I don’t know if an American company can still sue me in my country for pirating their copyrighted material – can Warner Bros fine me under US law if I pirate their movies?

The only thin I do know that I’m always going to use ExpressVPN or NordVPN as my VPN for Ororo.tv, so that I don’t get into trouble if it turns out that watching Ororo is not legal.

If you don’t want to use a VPN, I recommend that you check out an alternative to Ororo.tv, such as Amazon Video (which has a 30 day free trial going if you follow that link).

So Is Ororo.tv legal?

Ororo.tv claims to be technically legal because it exploits a legal loophole – at least in Russia and some other countries with specific copyright laws.

However, it seems like Ororo.tv exploits the copyright code in Russia to be legal, and I’m not sure if they can keep doing this forever.

Furthermore, even if Ororo.tv is legal in Russia, it might not be legal to watch in your country.

And above all, even if Ororo.tv is legal in your country, you might still get sued by the right holders of the movie you watch if they’re based in a different country.

So again, I’m not a legal scholar, but I wouldn’t bet on Ororo.tv actually being legal to watch.

So what’s the solution to all this?

There’s two main options if you want to avoid getting in trouble for breaking piracy laws:

• Get Ororo.tv + a VPN: you can use a VPN to hide your identity online, so that you’re less likely to get into trouble for using Ororo.tv. We recommend NordVPN, which is the biggest VPN provider. You can get NordVPN for only €3.12 per month if you sign up through our link for 2 years,
• Get an alternative: if you want to be a 100% sure that you don’t get into trouble, you should just get one of the fully legal alternatives to Ororo.tv, like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. We recommend the latter, because you can currently get a free trial to Amazon Prime Video for a month, so there’s no downside to trying it.

We hope this article helps you decide what you want to do!