Learning from experience

In any society, be it a Western democracy or an Islamic theocracy, once blogs and online forums grow influential enough, they start getting unfavourable attention from all sorts of parties, including authorities, courts, individuals and corporations – all alleging some sort of wrongdoing and seeking remedies. Both this attention and those remedies vary significantly, depending on local jurisdiction and legal tradition.

In totalitarian regimes, bloggers put themselves at risk by voicing unorthodox views, contradicting the reigning ideology, criticizing the political and/or economic system and making irreverent comments about rulers. In Western democracies, bloggers need not worry about such risks. But they have other challenges to consider. A survey, conducted among U.S.-based bloggers by MIT researchers in 2004 revealed that 12 per cent of those surveyed personally knew other bloggers who had encountered legal or professional problems because of things they wrote in their blogs.

These problems mostly concerned such matters as copyright violations or disclosure of proprietary information, whether personal or corporate. In Russia, by contrast, the Internet enjoys an impressive degree of freedom of speech, of which the state-controlled TV channels and the printed media can only dream these days. Regulations range from lax to nonexistent. Russia has many laws, regulating expression of certain views, which could be applied to Internet forums and blogs, but so far it has not happened.

Russia, therefore, has few examples of bloggers, online publishers and forum contributors or owners getting in trouble for their articles, posts or comments displayed on the Net. There have been probably not more than three dozen cases nationwide, ranging from students dismissed from colleges to mass media publications ordered shut by courts. Given Russia’s 26-million strong Internet audience (with 1,45 million blogs written in Russian) 30 cases do not seem serious. And they’re definitely dwarfed by the 12 percent of bloggers mentioned in the MIT research.

Still, some of those cases do deserve examination, since any of practices already seen might become more common and widespread in the future:

· Two students were expelled from universities for posting criticism of their professors and institutions as a whole; in both cases, the wording of the criticism was quite profane.

· A civil lawsuit was filed and lost by a journalist, whose ethics were questioned in comments in a private blog.

· A criminal case was opened against a journalist, who used strong language to criticize the governor of his region.

· A forum regular was sent to a mental institution for posting racially charged remarks. The prosecution accepted the suggestion to treat the defendant for schizophrenia. Several racists have been prosecuted for hate speech – punishable under Article 282 of the Russian criminal code -- on their sites and forums.

· A Ukrainian youth living in Novosibirsk is on trial for racist remarks he made in a Ukraine-based forum. It might be that his writings are punishable under Russian law, but there is no legal way to start investigation in Russia about the contents of a foreign web site, not required or expected to abide by Russian laws.

· The government ordered the closing of an information agency because of an anonymous anti-Islamic comment on its online forum; the order was challenged in court.

· Two online media web sites, in the Komi and Altai regions, were ordered shut (and one was even “confiscated”) for lack of publishing licenses. In fact, Russian law does not require any web site or individual to obtain a license.

· A court ordered the physical destruction of a computer after the owner was found guilty of insulting President Putin. The judge apparently did not realize, that there are easier ways to remove offending information from a hard disk, than to scrap an entire computer.

· A consumer forum was fi ned 8,000,000 rubles (U.S.$275.000) for an anonymous comment criticizing the Troika-Stal steel trading company. Being unable to establish the author of the post, the company sued the forum’s owners, and won on appeal.

Legislation has been drafted with no regard to Internet specifics; carrier doctrine is not formulated anywhere; indemnity clauses are very flexible, and they get bent arbitrarily, particularly by local authorities that have a serious influence over law enforcement and the courts in various regions of Russia. There are no clear-cut criteria for defining offensive speech. Interpretation is arbitrary, as is the choice of experts supplying courts with opinions. Judges are extremely illiterate about Internet and computer-related issues, and there is no system in place to educate them or the drafters of Internet related laws. Neither the Supreme Court nor appeals courts have been involved in litigation about online media, blogs or forums, meaning that lower court judges have nowhere to look for guidance.