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The State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted on 21 April 2017 amendments to the Federal Statute on Information, Information Technologies and Protection of Information (see IRIS 2014-3/40) that introduce a prohibition of foreign and restrictive regulation of national online cinemas. The act provides the notion of "the owner of an audiovisual service" and enumerates its responsibilities. Such an “owner” is defined as “the owner of a website and/or the website page on the Internet, and/or an information system, and/or a computer programme that are used to form and/or organize the distribution...

On 17 February 2017, the European Commission issued a decision on the temporary suspension of the retransmission of a television channel in Lithuania. On 16 November 2016 the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission adopted a decision pursuant to the Law on Provision of Information to the Public, which suspended for three months the retransmission, including on the Internet, of the Russian TV channel “RTR Planeta.” The decision entered into force on 21 November 2016 after the settlement with the Swedish authorities as the transmitting member state and broadcaster was not reached. This is not...

In Orlovskaya Iskra v. Russia the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has further developed its case law regarding freedom of expression and press freedom during election periods. The case concerns the application of a specific provision in Russian electoral law restricting the freedom of media reporting at election time. The Court’s judgment deals with the applicant’s conviction for an administrative offence for publishing critical articles about a politician during the 2007 parliamentary election campaign in Russia. The applicant is a non-governmental organisation that publishes Orlovskaya...

In one of its first judgments in 2017 related to the right to freedom of expression, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found a violation of a blogger’s right under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The blogger, Mr Terentyev, a musician and jazz critic, had been convicted in Russia for defamation after he had published an article on his personal website about a local jazz festival which was scathingly critical of the festival and its president, Mr Y. Mr Terentyev used various corruptions of the festival president’s surname to mock his professional competence....

LinkedIn, the major global professional social network, has been banned in Russia after a Moscow City Court upheld an earlier court decision taken upon a claim by Roskomnadzor, the governmental supervisory authority in media, communications and personal data traffic (see IRIS 2012-8/36). LinkedIn stood accused of failing to comply with a 2014 federal law requiring Internet companies that process Russian citizens’ personal information to store their user data on servers located in Russia (see IRIS 2014-8/35). Reportedly Linkedin had more than 6,000,000 users in Russia. The court of first instance...