Roskomnadzor may receive powers to block copies of pirated sites

Introduced to the State Duma bill on the transfer of powers to block access to “mirrors” (copies of already blocked pirate sites) from the Ministry of Digital Development to Roskomnadzor (RKN). How explained one of the authors of the document is deputy Alexander Khinshtein (United Russia), the amendments will optimize the blocking process, reducing the procedure for restricting access to two days.

Amendments are proposed to be made to the federal law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection.” The explanatory note to the document states that the process of limiting access to “mirrors” provided for by current legislation “appears to be excessively difficult.”

Now, when a copy of a pirated site is discovered on the Internet, information about this is sent to the Ministry of Digital Development. The agency must make a decision within a day to recognize the resource as a copy of the blocked site, and then notify the owner of the page and Roskomnadzor. Having received the decision of the Ministry of Digital Development, RKN is obliged to contact hosting providers, telecom operators and search engine operators within 24 hours to restrict access to the site.

“The bill provides for the transfer of powers to make a decision on recognizing a site as a “mirror” of a pirated resource and forwarding such a decision to the owner of the “mirror” site directly to Roskomnadzor as a regulator,” the document says. It is noted that this approach will reduce the process of restricting access to sites to two days.

The bill also proposes to extend the obligation to remove “mirrors” from search results to all search engines. Now only search engine operators distributing advertising in the Russian segment of the Internet should do this.

The law restricting access to “mirrors” came into force on July 1, 2017. Since that time, about 59 thousand sites have been recognized as pirated, and access to them has been limited. According to the explanatory note, starting from 2020, more than 12 thousand such decisions are made annually.

Read more about blocking sites in the Kommersant publication. “Roskomnadzor has declined”.

Milena Kostereva