What agency should be given authority to ban access to Internet sites, and how are these decisions going to be implemented?

The Internet affects the everyday lives of people around the world. However, legal issues relating to the World Wide Web have not, until recently, been addresses in Russia in a comprehensive way. Federal officials in Moscow are now ready to implement regulatory measures for imposing new rules on the Russian online community. Government leaders, IP lawyers, and the general public have talked about this reform already for several years.

The new rules are designed to target copyright violations and cybercrime, as well as to designate the parameters, within which state authorities would be able to limit Internet access. There exists no uniform approach to resolving these issues under Russian law. The R.F. Ministry of Mass Media and Communications does not plan to propose an entirely new law “On the Internet,” but rather to amend past enactments.

In May, a special working group under the leadership of Alexei Soldatov, Deputy Mass Media and Communications Minister, began to discuss the ways of regulating the Internet. Mikhail Yakushev, who serves as the chairman of the Coordination Center for Top-Level Domain .RU, believes that the Internet has reached a stage of development, where legal regulation has become indispensible.

According to Ulyana Zinina, senior corporate lawyer at Yandex Internet company, whose representatives take part in the working group’s meetings, Europe and the U.S. made changes to their laws to regulate the Internet more than a decade ago. While Russia’s online technologies developed at a slower pace, it is now time for Russia to adopt similar provisions.

Experts believe that there is no need to create a whole body of law dealing exclusively with the Internet. The experience of other countries made it clear that viewing the Internet as an isolated communications medium does not bring good results.

Laws that govern Internet use are dispersed throughout the Russian code. Many sections that are ambiguous can be corrected by precise amendments, and there is no need to rewrite the entire regulatory framework. In general, the changed law will not depart significantly from the general principles already in place. The fundamental rights secured in the constitution and other Russian laws will be protected, according to the Ministry.

The working group addressed a number of technical issues and made an effort to give definitions to certain legal terms. The regulation will address the interaction of users on the Internet, as well as the relationship of users to service providers and government regulatory agencies. Issues relating to the use of the web resource by mass media groups will also be considered. The subject of e-commerce and consumer rights protection is particularly sensitive.

The most problematic issue that needs to be decided on is what agency should be given authority to ban access to Internet sites. In March, representatives of the Moscow Police came out with declarations of intent to close torrent-tracking websites and prosecute their developers.

The Russian government, on the whole, does not think it is appropriate for the Police to be the ultimate regulator of the Internet. Recently, when the Moscow Police suspended the hosting service ifolder.ru, which was alleged to have contributed to copyright infringement, President Medvedev asked the Minister of Internal Affairs (Russian Police) Rashid Nurgaliyev to investigate the incident.

The operations of one of the largest torrent sites in the Russian web-space torrents.ru were also suspended in February for an investigation to establish copyright law violations. Another torrent-tracking site filehoster.ru was also banned in April.

Among the tasks before the working group is to decide once and for all what agency and pursuant to what authority would have the ability to limit the public’s access to online resources. The Ministry of Mass Media and Communication has not made any decisions on these issues yet.

In the view of Ulyana Zinina, limiting access to the web can amount to a violation of human rights, and, as such, the only manner in which it should be done is on the basis of a court decree.

The infringement of intellectual property rights also presents substantial problems. Different Russian courts have rendered inconsistent decisions in regards to copyright protection. A court in Moscow imposed a fine on Rambler Internet Holding, after one of the portal’s users placed on its server a video owned by First Music Publishing House. A St. Petersburg court, however, denied relief in a similar case, where users of a social networking site Vkontakte posted on the site a film that belonged to the state-owned broadcasting company VGTRK.

According to industry analysts, the liability for unlawfully spreading copyrighted information should be imposed not only on the website companies that host the illegal content, but also on persons who placed the information on the Internet in violation of the law.