Yesterday the State Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament, voted to approve the first reading of two bills that place certain limits on freedom of speech in Russia. One essentially prohibits citizens from publishing unreliable news stories on the Internet while applying the same prohibition to news outlets both online and in other media. …
Russian lawmakers to outlaw ‘fake news’ and insulting the government Read More
Will Facebook and Twitter abide by the law on personal data storage, or could they ultimately be blocked in Russia like LinkedIn? The suspense remains as the two companies failed again last week, more than three years after the law came to force, to prove their compliance with it. Adopted in 2014 and applicable since September 2015, this law …
On December 19 the State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament, adopted amendments to the criminal code article that represses “the provocation to hatred or enmity ” and “offence to human dignity.” The amendments partially decriminalize the code’s Article 282, which has been widely used for such offences involving social media content. As reported by online …
Russian lawmakers amend criminal code to reduce pressure on social media activity Read More
LSE-listed Mail.Ru Group, which owns Russia’s largest social networks Vkontakte (VK) and Odnoklassiki (OK), has signed an option agreement to complete the acquisition of United Media Agency (UMA), an aggregator and distributor of digital content. UMA is, in particular, the owner of music rights in Vkontakte and of BOOM, a top music app. “Mail.Ru Group’s relationship …
Mail.Ru Group agrees full acquisition of music rights owner UMA for $97 million Read More
The State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, has postponed the second reading of a long-awaited bill intended to regulate to regulate digital financial assets, including cryptocurrencies, and ICOs. Lawmakers will review the draft law “On Digital Financial Assets” during the spring parliamentary session next year, the house deputy speaker Sergey Neverov announced. In …
Russian parliament postpones adoption of digital assets bill Read More
On December 14 Russian lawmakers Lyudmila Bokova, Andrey Klishas and Andrey Lugovoy submitted to the State Duma draft amendments to the existing legislation to ensure a “secure and stable functioning” of the Internet network. Should these amendments be adopted, the country would use its own domain name system and Internet traffic routing, where only Russian websites would work. …
How Russia could build its own, autonomous Internet Read More
Roskomnadzor, the Russian telecom and Internet regulator, has fined Google for failing to comply with a law that requires online search engines to purge any hyperlinks to materials that are banned in Russia. Google has refused to connect to Federal State Information System (FGIS) where these websites are listed. The fine amounts to 500,000 rubles ($7,537 at today’s …
Google fined in Russia for refusing to censor search results Read More
A Russian court dedicated to intellectual property cases has successfully tested a blockchain network for storing copyright data. The technology was reportedly used for the first time in the judicial area in Russia, major Russian news agency TASS wrote Monday, Dec. 3. According to TASS, the court recorded a change in a group of right holders, using a blockchain solution provided …
Russian intellectual property court trials blockchain to store copyright data Read More
US prosecutors have indicted eight people, most of them Russian, for an alleged online fraud involving fake advertising that caused companies to lose tens of millions of dollars, the Justice Department announced late on November 27. In one alleged scheme that began in 2015, two of the accused operated a fake advertising network that used …
US charges six Russians, two Kazakhs in online ad fraud scheme Read More
On November 26 Roskomnadzor, the Russian telecom and Internet regulator, announced administrative charges against Google for failing to comply with a law that requires online search engines to purge any hyperlinks to materials that are banned in Russia. Google has also refused to connect to the federal information system where these websites are listed. For violating …
Google faces fine for refusing to censor search results in Russia Read More
The authorities of Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula which has been disputed between Russia and Ukraine since 2014, are considering creating a new international blockchain technology training center. Such a center would teach “specialists from countries under sanctions how to use new technologies to attract foreign investors,” Roman Tkachenko, the president of the Crimean Republican Association …
Liliya Chanysheva, an activist who works at Alexey Navalny’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, is suing the social network Vkontakte (a property of LSE-listed Mail.Ru Group) for disclosing users’ personal information to Russian law enforcement. According to Chanysheva’s lawyer, police have tried to justify the information collection by citing two federal laws, though both these laws limit …
How Vkontakte cooperates with Russian law enforcement and secret service agencies Read More
