Amendments to the "anti-piracy" law, allowing to block sites forever, signed by the president

Amendments to the "Anti-piracy" law signed by the President of Russia, and will come into force on May 1, 2015. Now sites that violate the relevant paragraphs of the law, it will be possible to block forever. At the same time, music, books, software, movies - everything except photos are considered to be “pirated” content.

True, the owners of sites accused of piracy, it is possible to agree on everything with the owners before the trial. Forever the site will be closed only in case of two defendant losses in the proceedings on claims of the same right holder. Decision on blocking obliged Moscow City Court. In the event of a decision to block by the court, this decision is reported to the Roskomnadzor. The latter requires telecom operators to restrict users to access the site for 24 hours.
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In addition, Roskomnadzor will enter violators in the registry. After the amendments, the law now states that “the removal of restrictions on access to such a site on the Internet is not allowed.”

It is worth noting that one of the authors of the amendments, Deputy Minister of Culture Georgy Ivliev, believes that there can be no cases of erroneous blocking. “There are no mistakes in the judicial procedure,” the deputy minister commented on the situation. Later, Ivliev explained that the owner of a “good” site will always be able to prove his innocence in court, and the trial of the owner of the “white” resource is unlikely, since the right holder simply will not sue such site.

Lawyers familiar with the copyright and the protection situation in the Global Network are of a different opinion . “This is an absolutely unprecedented norm for Russian legislation. According to Russian law, even a previous conviction can be repaid over time, the lawyer notes, so he considers perpetual blocking as a measure of responsibility for infringement of exclusive rights as nonsense, which has no analogues, ”lawyer Trunov, Aivar and Partners lawyer Sarkis Darbinian comments on the situation.

“This measure beats either legal resources or resources that have problems with piracy, but they want to solve. Frankly, the pirate will continue to play cat and mouse - they will move to another address, ”says Karen Ghazaryan, leading analyst at RAEC.

According to the representative of the Pirate Party of Russia Artem Kozlyuk, erroneous blocking may well be. One of the reasons is the possibility of blocking the site by ip, and not by url. As a result - “under the distribution” can get several quite decent sites at once. On the other hand, ip can be changed, even within the same hosting, but the url is more complicated.

According to Yevgeny Oreshin, a senior lawyer at Goltsblat BLP, the amendments to the “anti-piracy” law do not at all cancel the possibility of contesting the site blockade by its owner in court. The same decision of the Moscow City Court can be appealed in the appellate, cassation and supervisory procedure in the Moscow City Court and in the Supreme Court of Russia.

It is worth recalling that the original version of the "anti-piracy" law began to work from August 1, 2013. This law allows copyright holders who have discovered the facts of illegal distribution of video content on the Web to appeal to the court with the request to block the resource. Until May 1, this version of the law will be in force, and after May 1, 2015, the law will come into force, as amended.