Unsportsmanlike war: how to use the registry of banned sites in business interests

In RosKomSvobodu addressed one of the site administrators SportsWiki.ru with enough interesting work related to the resource lock.

The “Bodybuilding Encyclopedia”, created by the sports community on the wiki engine, was the victim of a blacklist as a result of a lawsuit by a dietary supplement manufacturer who did not like publications about the product he was selling. The decision of the Oktyabrsky District Court of Penza demonstrates an example of how the blocking mechanism of sites began to be used in the judicial system not only to combat child porn and pirated copies of blobusters, but also to unfair competition between entrepreneurs, as well as to remove unwanted information from the network.

As reported on the site itself, “Sportswiki.ru is a non-profit scientific abstracted reference wiki for athletes and is one of the 15 most visited sports sites in Russia. Many articles are aimed at exposing quackery from manufacturers of dietary supplements and sports nutrition. ”

On June 24, 2014, the site administration received a letter of happiness from Roskomnadzor from the hosting provider stating that the domain name www.sportswiki.ru was included in the register of banned sites .

Interestingly enough, the letter was received on behalf of the consultant of the Roskomnadzor hotline on supporting the implementation of Federal Law No. 139-ФЗ “On Amending the Federal Law“ On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development ”, despite the fact that there are claims to The site has nothing to do with the grounds that were introduced into the Federal Law “On Information” by the blocking amendments of recent years. At the same time, Roskomnadzor, as is usually the case, warning about the illegality of the information posted, cannot give any concrete clarification which of several thousand textual materials published by the community violate the legislation of the Russian Federation.

It turned out a little later that the reason for blocking the open network encyclopedia on scientific bodybuilding with an audience of more than 100,000 people was the decision of the Penza court of 03/27/2014, which, according to a lawsuit by a certain citizen Elistratov Dmitry Gennadievich to the hoster of MakHost LLC, found that the site illegally promotes the use of anabolic steroids and marijuana, which violates the requirements of the law, and therefore access to the site should be permanently blocked throughout the Russian Federation.

Moreover, despite the fact that Elistratov appears in the case as an offended consumer, whose right to receive safe information from the Internet was violated, the purpose of his appeal to the court was completely different.

According to open information in the network, Elistratov Dmitry Gennadevich, is the General Director of Parapharm LLC and Secrets of Longevity. These companies became famous in RuNet as manufacturers of dubious dietary supplements.

The thing turned out that a few years ago the sportswiki.ru website wrote a critical article about the Leveton supplement, after which the site administration began to receive complaints from Elistratov’s employees through the hoster and registrars with the request to remove inconvenient information expressing the private conviction of the scientific community based on the results of a study of the company's products.

The pressure on the site administrators was getting stronger. As can be seen from the court’s decision, Elistratov had previously appealed to the Federal Drug Control Service with a similar request to block the site, but the department refused him, not having found any prohibited information on the site. That's when Mr. Elistratov decided to follow the path already blocked by Roskomnadzor and the prosecution authorities to block the site.

For the first time in law enforcement practice to terminate access to a site on the Internet, the court applied not only the provisions of special Federal Law No. 149-ФЗ “On Information”, which regulates the limiting grounds for such extreme measures as the termination of access to a site on the Internet, but also the provisions The Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights, which allows you to sue the Plaintiff at the place of residence.

The trial did not appear to be very long. The site administration and the domain name administrator were not notified of the trial, the hoster, as a weakly motivated party, did not participate in the process, and therefore only the representative of the Claimant and the judge were present in the court.

Obviously, the representative of the plaintiff showed the court the print screens taken out of the context of the site, certified by a notary, and, substantiating his complaint with judicial practice in such cases, in the absence of any other parties to the case whose rights and legitimate interests were affected by the decision (authors of the publication, domain administrator) , I was able to convince the judge that the resources should be entered in the register with the subsequent unlimited blocking of the site by Internet providers throughout the country.

Information on the specific url of the pages on which the illegal information is posted has not yet been submitted to the site administration or to the information intermediaries. The site is no longer available in normal access mode, and will be blocked by court decision by all providers indefinitely. Now Sportsviki is collecting signatures in support of the site , and RosKomSvoboda’s lawyers are preparing a complaint to overturn a clearly unlawful court decision. Such a case shows us an example of how contagious it became the desire of an increasing number of participants to block something on the network and how to easily and naturally stop access to any site, even without accepting more and more new grounds in Article 15 of Federal Law No. 149-ФЗ “ About Information ”, to which so many hands reach today.

We will inform the court about the progress of the case and wish SportsWiki all the best.

And once again I remind everyone of the technical tools that will help to access blocked sites.