Last year right holders have achieved permanent blocking of Rutracker.org site for copyright infringement. But the result – permanent blocking – was not enough for them. Clones of Rutracker appeared in spite of right holders. In order to shut down Rutracker’s “family” it was necessary to start all over again.
Right holders decided to make it simply and asked the court to block “mirrors” of Rutracker. But the court refused to do it. According to judge the claimants have not indicated domain names of mirrors and their network addresses. Court’s decision concerning permanent blocking of Rutracker does not relate to mirrors of Rutracker. Therefore in order to avoid legal uncertainty the court refused to block mirrors of Rutracker.
“Permanently restricted access to unidentified (abstract) web-sites would entail legal uncertainty and would exclude any possibility to execute court order,” – explained the judge. It is pretty expensive for right holder to start all over again for each domain name, for each web-site. Therefore Russian legislators proposed decision – new draft law on blocking of derivative web-sites. This draft law should be adopted in Russia near future.
The initial draft of this law provides definition of “derivative site in Internet” – it is site in internet, derived from (most likely original) site in internet, having name (domain or just name of web-site – it is not clear) and/or display (why not design and/or architecture?) similar to confusion with (original) site and created as a result of displacement or copying, partially or totally, of information from (original) site in internet.
Derivative site also can be synchronized with original, information can be translated into other language, or derivative site can redirect to original site. The definition of mirror is very original. Mostly web-sites, having nothing in common with blocked web-sites, can fall under this definition. Search engines also are obliged to exclude from search results “data about referrers to pages of web-site in internet, if the access to such web-site is blocked”. Perhaps the legislators wanted to say “exclude address from search results”?
In order to restrict access to derivative web-site the claimant must file 1) the claim to restrict access to the derivative web-site, 2) citing to the court’s decision to block access to original site and 3) conclusion of relevant authority (most likely it is Russian Roskomnadzor, but Russian Ministry of Communication suits under draft law) that the web-site in question is derivative. If claimant has made everything right, the court issues the order to block derivative web-site.