Unsporting war: how to use the registry of prohibited sites in the business interest

One of the administrators of the SportsWiki.ru site addressed RosKomSvobdu with a rather interesting affair related to blocking a resource.

The Bodybuilding Encyclopedia, created by the sports community on the wiki engine, became a victim of the blacklist as a result of a lawsuit by the manufacturer of dietary supplements, who did not like the publications about the product they sell. The decision of the Oktyabrsky District Court of Penza demonstrates an example of how the site blocking mechanism was used in the judicial system not only to combat child porn and pirated copies of blockbusters, but also for unfair competition between entrepreneurs and the removal of unwanted information from the network.

As reported on the site itself, “Sportswiki.ru is a non-commercial scientific abstract wiki reference book for athletes and is included in the 15 most visited sports sites in Russia. Many articles are aimed at exposing quackery from the side of dietary supplements and sports nutrition manufacturers. ”

On June 24, 2014, the site administration received a letter of happiness from Roskomnadzor from a hosting provider stating that the domain name www.sportswiki.ru was entered in the registry of prohibited sites .
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It is quite interesting that the letter was received on behalf of the Roskomnadzor hotline consultant to support the implementation of Federal Law No. 139- “On Amendments to the Federal Law“ On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development ”, despite the fact that The site has nothing to do with the grounds that were introduced into the Federal Law “On Information” by the blocking amendments of recent years. At the same time, Roskomnadzor, as it usually happens, warning about the illegality of the information posted, cannot give any specific explanation as to which of the several thousand text materials published by the community violate the laws of the Russian Federation.

Later it turned out that the reason for blocking an open network encyclopedia on scientific bodybuilding with an audience of more than 100,000 people was the decision of the Penza court dated March 27, 2014, which, according to a lawsuit by a certain citizen Elistratov Dmitry Gennadyevich to the hosting company Makhost, established that the site illegally promotes use anabolic steroids and marijuana, in connection with which violates the requirement of the law, and therefore access to the site should be permanently blocked on the territory of the entire Russian Federation.

At the same time, despite the fact that Elistratov appears in the case as an offended consumer, whose right to receive secure information from the Internet was violated, the goals of his appeal to the court were completely different.

According to public information on the network, Elistratov Dmitry Gennadyevich, is the general director of LLC Parapharm and Secrets of Longevity. These companies became famous in RuNet as manufacturers of questionable dietary supplements.

It turned out that several years ago the community wrote a critical article on the site sportswiki.ru about the addition of “Leveton”, after which the site’s administration began to receive complaints from Yelistratov’s employees through a hoster and registrars with the requirement to remove uncomfortable information expressing the private conviction of the scientific community based on the results of the study of the company's products.

The pressure on the site administrators was getting stronger. As can be seen from the decision of the court, Elistratov has previously appealed to the Federal Drug Control Service with a similar request to block the site, but the department refused to give him permission without finding any prohibited information on the site. It was then that Mr. Elistratov decided to follow the path of the track already blocked by Roskomnadzor and the prosecution authorities.

For the first time in law enforcement practice to terminate access to a website on the Internet, the court applied not only the provisions of special Federal Law No. 149- “On Information” regulating the ultimate grounds for such extreme measures as termination of access to a website on the Internet, but also provisions Of the Law “On Protection of Consumer Rights”, which allows to sue the Plaintiff’s place of residence.

The trial, apparently, was not very long. The site administration and the domain name administrator were not notified of the trial, the hoster did not participate as a weakly motivated party, and therefore only the representative of the Complainant and the judge were present in the court.

Obviously, the representative of the plaintiff showed to the court the notary’s tears out of the context of the print screen site, and, justifying his complaint with court practice in such cases, in the absence of any other parties to the case, whose rights and legal interests are affected by the decision (authors of the publication, domain administrator) I was able to convince the judge that the resources are to be entered in the register with the subsequent indefinite blocking of the site by Internet service providers throughout the country.

Information on specific url pages that contain illegal information has not yet been provided to the site administration or to info brokers. The site is no longer available in the normal access mode, and will be blocked by a court by all providers indefinitely. Now “Sportswiki” is collecting signatures in support of the site , and lawyers of RosKomSvoboda are preparing a complaint about the repeal of a clearly illegal court decision. Such a case shows us an example of how infectious the desire of an increasing number of participants to block something on the network and how easily and unconditionally to stop access to any site, even without accepting all new grounds in Article 15 of Federal Law No. 149-, was infectious. About the information ", to which so many hands are pulled today.

We will inform on the progress of the case in court and wish Sportsviki every success.

And once again I remind everyone about the technical means that will help to gain access to blocked sites.