The Russian president has signed the law amending federal Russian law about information, its dissemination and informational technologies and Russian administrative code. Now the owners of software, web-sites and/or page of web-site in Internet, exploited for purposes of processing and dissemination of information must be beware of more strict conditions in Russian state.
What news aggregators should do in order to comply with new law? First of all they should not use its service in order to break the current law – to commit the crime, disclose secret information protected by law, publicly justify terrorism or disseminate any other extremist materials. They must check any information before to make it available for public and desist to disseminate it under prescription. It is prohibited to use news aggregator in order to hide or misrepresent information important for public, to disseminate false information important for public presenting it as true. News aggregator must make its email address and the name publicly available in order to receive legal notices; they also should keep disseminated information, its sources and terms of its dissemination during six months.
The news aggregator is not liable for disseminated information if it was literally reproduced information already published by mass-media, because in this case all liability bears mass-media. Federal authority responsible for supervision of news aggregators’ activity is responsible for registry of them. Federal authority monitors informational resources, sets up procedure to define daily auditory of resource and requires owners of news aggregators necessary information in order to maintain such registry. News aggregators have ten days to reply.
If daily auditory of news aggregator is lesser than one million visitors during the last three months, the owner of such news aggregator has the right to ask to exclude its resource from registry of news aggregators. If the daily auditory of news aggregator is lesser than one million visitors during the last six months the federal authority can exclude resource from its registry without request of news aggregator.
But there is one very interesting thing. The owner of news aggregator can be only legal entity incorporated in Russian Federation or citizen of Russian Federation. But if relevant federal authority, responsible for execution of this law, will find in Internet any resource processing and disseminating information in Russian language and where can be advertisement intended to attract attention of customers residing in Russia with daily auditory of one million visitors, it can admit and register such resource as news aggregator under the Russian law. The law does not specify territorial issue. Under this law the resource can be anywhere in the world. Despite the access to this resource from territory of Russia, its hosting can be outside this country. The law does not deal with this issue.