Where is the "Lock Button"?

Sometimes it seems that district prosecutors intentionally do everything possible to destroy e-commerce in RuNet as soon as possible. Or such indefatigable activity is the result of uncontrolled actions of competitors who actively use the institute of prosecutor's supervision for their own non-market struggle in the digital market. And the more practice becomes in the field, the more absurd are the decisions of the courts, and the more obvious and dangerous are the violations of the constitutional rights of citizens to freedom of expression and free business activity.



The Center for the Protection of Digital Rights has been approached by a fairly well-known company on the market LLC Button (also has a blog on Habré ), which provides outsourcing accounting services for enterprises and individual entrepreneurs. The reason was the inclusion in the register of prohibited information on the company's website page based on the decision of the Ishimsky Court of the Tyumen Region, which recognized the information in one of the posts in the company's blog as illegal.

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It must be said that the Ishim court, having concentrated, apparently, on the blogosphere, has made such a non-trivial decision not for the first time in a month. It is worth remembering the very recent history of the prohibition of a given post by a court about analyzing the hacking of the Moscow Metro Troika map published on Habré (and suddenly already closed ). Apparently the prosecutor and the court of the county town of the Tyumen region considered it extremely important to protect the Moscow metro (sic!). And now, the Ishim law-enforcers set their sights on analyzing the provision of accounting services via the Internet. Probably, they want to catch to themselves in the “cane” reports of golden weighty fish, as on the emblem of their native city.



As is usually the case in such cases, the administration of the site learned about the decision of the court after the fact, after it entered into legal force and included the site in the Unified Register of Roskomnadzor. If within 3 days the administration would not delete the page on its official website, the entire site would be subject to blocking by telecom operators throughout the country, including by IP-address.







After getting acquainted with the court decision, it became obvious that the Ishim court decision of January 26, 2017 is another legal masterpiece of Russian prosecutors, created in conjunction with regional judges. At the suit of the public prosecutor defending public interests, the court declared illegal the publication in 2015 of the company's blog on “How to withdraw money legally from OOO’s accounts” . At the same time, Roskomnadzor again played in silence, without providing the court with any opinion of the regulator or a specialist to participate in the process.



A copy of the post itself has been preserved in the Internet Archive, which is kindly provided by the Wayback Machine service.



Judging by the judicial act, the claims of the supervisory authority concerned the phrase “taken away from the context of the legal entity and taken at its own discretion” taken out of context. At the same time, the meaning of the marked phrase is beyond recognition distorted in the decision itself.





According to the legal position of the prosecutor, on one of the pages of the blog was discovered information revealing the method of committing crimes, the responsibility for which is provided for in Art. 160 of the Criminal Code (misappropriation or embezzlement). The court’s decision in support of the satisfaction of the claim stated that

“... free access to information containing methods of taking money from a legal entity, for which criminal responsibility is provided, contributes to the formation of public opinion on the possibility of committing crimes to meet their own needs with impunity, violates the public interests of the Russian Federation and an indefinite number of persons, puts under a threat to public relations in the sphere of economic activity. ”

Probably, if Judge Sharapova and Prosecutor Cardiac were familiarized with the full text of the publication, it would become obvious to them that there was no illegal information in the disputed post. On the contrary, describing various ways of withdrawing money from society, the author of the post leads the reader to fairly straightforward conclusions, indicating that the most secure and legal way to withdraw money from a company is to pay dividends. At the same time, the author calls some methods extreme and warns about their illegality, pointing out in a post that “the game is not worth the candle”.



Thus, we, non-linguists, failed to identify any calls for the commission of a crime and tax offenses in a publication. But, judging by the decision, not even appeals were grounds for declaring the information illegal. There are no court conclusions. The basis was the dissemination of information about the methods of committing a crime, which in itself looks very strange from the point of view of the law.



If you are guided by the logic of the prosecutor and the court, in Russia any criminal law editors, a criminal chronicle of the media describing the method of committing a crime and all court practice in the public domain should be declared illegal, since court decisions in criminal cases have detailed descriptions of all kinds ways of committing various crimes.



The management of the company and the lawyers of the Center categorically disagree with such an arbitrary and expansive interpretation of the law and have now filed an appeal to the Tyumen Regional Court. The court’s decision violated a whole range of constitutional rights of the company “Button” and its employees: to freedom of expression, the right to freedom of dissemination of legal information. Currently, the article has been deleted and will be restored on the site after the abolition of the unjust act, because otherwise Roskomnadzor would block the entire website of the company, which would inevitably lead to a violation of the right to freely engage in business activities. After all, websites and Internet services are one of the most valuable things we have in the digital economy.