Russian Ministry Of Culture Publishes Draft Anti-Piracy Law; Requires Takedowns Within 24 Hours

from the bad-ideas dept

Presumably as part of the overall agreement for Russia to be allowed to join the WTO, the Ministry of Culture there has published a draft of its anti-piracy law (via @PostActa). Here’s the google translation of a story on the roem.ru site:

The Ministry of Culture has published the text of the draft law “On amendments to some legislative acts of the Russian Federation in order to stop the violations of intellectual property rights in the information and telecommunications networks, including the” Internet “,” designed to combat Internet piracy – the amendments proposed to the Federal Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Protection of Information” and the Code of Administrative Offences.

According to the text of amendments, site owners and hosting providers will have to remove content that violates the copyright, or block access to it within a day after treatment the original.

As can be seen, the key element is a 24-hour takedown requirement. There’s a range of fines for non-compliance, increasing rapidly according to the size of the business involved. What’s not clear is how “violations” are to be established or how access is to be blocked if sites are outside Russia. The rapid take-down requirement would imply this is the usual “guilty until proven innocent” approach. That’s also suggested by the following comments from leading Russian Internet companies, who are plainly unhappy with the proposal:

Representatives of Internet companies (Yandex and Mail.Ru) responded with disapproval of the draft law in the comments to “Kommersant”. The head of the legal service of Anton Malginova Mail.ru Group, the project was prepared without the involvement of industry experts, and existing legislation fully protects the rights holders.

This indicates that the draft law was drawn up without any input from people who actually understand the Internet. Given that extraordinary fact, it seems unlikely that groups representing the public were asked, either. We’ll have to wait for more details to emerge to see how exactly things will work in practice, but it certainly looks like Russia is adopting the worst ideas from the West in its headlong rush to “respectability”.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: , ,

Rate this comment as insightful
Rate this comment as funny
You have rated this comment as insightful
You have rated this comment as funny
Flag this comment as abusive/trolling/spam
You have flagged this comment
The first word has already been claimed
The last word has already been claimed
Insightful Lightbulb icon Funny Laughing icon Abusive/trolling/spam Flag icon Insightful badge Lightbulb icon Funny badge Laughing icon Comments icon

Comments on “Russian Ministry Of Culture Publishes Draft Anti-Piracy Law; Requires Takedowns Within 24 Hours”

Subscribe: RSS Leave a comment
17 Comments
Zakida Paul says:

All this tells me is that corruption is in every country of the world. It does not matter if a government is right leaning, left leaning or in the centre ground; governments are not in charge of the country. The real rulers are the multi national corporations who think nothing of buying policy and laws with ‘donations’.

The entire system does not need a reboot, as I originally thought. It needs to be completely dismantled and rebuilt.

Josef Anvil (profile) says:

Worst thing ever

All this shows is how powerful communication is to humanity. As far as most governments around the world are concerned, the internet is the worst thing ever.

It’s difficult to shape the thoughts of the population when they can just go online and communicate with people from around the world and make up their minds based on experience rather than propaganda. Copyright is just one of the best tools to attack freedom to communicate and share. I’m just tired of the piracy and theft being used to describe sharing.

Quick tangent. If our governments were really concerned for “the children” why aren’t there free online textbooks for every public school. The tech is certainly there. But…but…but… what about the textbook publishers’ income. Ummm who the hell cares? Textbooks are supposed to be facts that are meant to be shared for the betterment of society as a whole, not the profit of the publishers.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Worst thing ever

Exactly, and what these knuckle dragging “leaders” fail to realize is that a well informed and educated populace is conducive to greater progress, efficiency and therefore profits. The downside, for them, is that they would have to actually learn something themselves and possibly act like a human being.

Roger says:

So what happens if you are a private individual, off-grid and at the start of an annual vacation, when some rights holder makes a totally unsubstantiated claim, or else deems something you’ve posted to be not fair use, but “theft”?

Same for businesses too small to have a member of staff, or a web development service on remittance, dedicated to hovering over an “unpublish” button.

The presumption of guilt, the time scales, this is another thuggish attack on the feasibility of web publishing for individuals, small businesses, common carriers, and others; all made possible by the fact that big content has write permissions for international IP agreements, whereas the rest of us only have (partial) access and (partial) read permissions.

Anonymous Coward says:

“This indicates that the draft law was drawn up without any input from people who actually understand the Internet.”

Hey, people who knew nothing about cars used to write up laws about cars, what’s the big deal?

Doesn’t everyone obey that 100+ year old law in PA that says whenever a horse is nearby and scared of your car that you must stop the car, take your car apart, throw the parts in the bushes, and wait for the horse to leave?

(for those who don’t know, the historical reason behind this law is that when cars were invented, horses were often terrified of seeing cars moving without anyone pulling them, which caused them run around like crazy, ignoring all commands given to them. This was especially bad when horses had a rider, or were pulling a wagon, which seriously injured people)

Anonymous Coward says:

so, who decides what needs to be taken down? what compensation is there for false take downs? as there was no input from anyone else other than i suspect the entertainment industries, it sounds very much to me like a Russian version of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. i bet it has been promoted by the USA in some way. when you think that the bills mentioned above were stopped in their entirety, but are still being implemented a bit at a time, anyone that thinks this fight is over is in cloud cuckoo land. the entertainment industries will get what they want, simply because it is in the various governments interests t for it to happen. that is because it allows the governments to carry out the spying on everyone that they want to do, by incorporating their bits into what the industries want. the only unhappy bunnies, as usual, are those that get hit and suffer, the ordinary people!!

Add Your Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here

Comment Options:

Make this the or (get credits or sign in to see balance) what's this?

What's this?

Techdirt community members with Techdirt Credits can spotlight a comment as either the "First Word" or "Last Word" on a particular comment thread. Credits can be purchased at the Techdirt Insider Shop »

Follow Techdirt

Techdirt Daily Newsletter

Ctrl-Alt-Speech

A weekly news podcast from
Mike Masnick & Ben Whitelaw

Subscribe now to Ctrl-Alt-Speech »
Techdirt Deals
Techdirt Insider Discord
The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...
Loading...