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The wording of the Federal Statutes “On amendments to the Federal Statutes ‘On Communications’ and ‘On Information, Information Technologies and the Protection of Information’” states its aim to be that of enabling the Russian sector of the Internet to operate independently of the World Wide Web in the event of an emergency or foreign threat. On 16 April 2019, the Russian State Duma approved the bill in its third reading, and on 22 April, the Federation Council (the upper house of the Russian Parliament) approved it. It was signed by President Vladimir Putin on 1 May 2019 and enters into force...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered an interesting judgment on the freedom of expression of a blogger (see also Egill Einarsson v. Iceland (No. 2), IRIS 2018-9/2 and Savva Terentyev v. Russia, IRIS 2018-9/3). The ECtHR values the statements of the blogger as those of a “public watchdog” and finds that his conviction for defamation violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In 2015 Mr Maksim Sergeyevich Rebechenko published on YouTube a video with the title “Kolkhoz TV on Ukrainian crisis”. In the video he made a series of critical comments about a speech...

On 18 March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a set of amendments to the Federal Statute on information, information technologies and protection of information (or the IT Law, see IRIS 2018-1/39, IRIS 2017-8/34, IRIS 2014-6/31 and IRIS 2014-3/40) that aim to stop online dissemination of certain categories of offensive information. A new Article 15-1-1 bans spreading information that “exhibits blatant disrespect for the society, State, official state symbols of the Russian Federation, Constitution of the Russian Federation or governmental bodies of the Russian Federation.” The...

On 18 March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a set of amendments to the Federal Statute on information, information technologies and the protection of information (or the IT Law, see IRIS 2018-1/39, IRIS 2017-8/34, IRIS 2014-6/31 and IRIS 2014-3/40) that aim to stop online dissemination of certain categories of false information under the guise of truthful information. The amendments are to the existing Article 15-3 (“Procedures for restricting access to information disseminated illegally”) of the IT Law. They prohibit the dissemination in “network publications” (or registered...

On 1 November 2018, Roskomnadzor (the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecoms, Information Technologies and Mass Communications - a governmental watchdog authority) (see IRIS 2012-8/36) - hosted a ceremony at which major Russian audiovisual content owners co-signed (along with providers of online search engines and owners of web resources that allow for video hosting) a memorandum that aims to strengthen the protection of intellectual property of online audiovisual products. A database of copyright-infringing webpages and audiovisual content in Russia is being established by content...