The law on bloggers, which allows for bloggers to be classed as mass media, takes legal effect on Aug. 1.
The appropriate amendments to the federal law On Information,
Information Technologies and Information Protection and some legislative
acts were earlier passed by the State Duma and approved by the
Federation Council.
The law provides that bloggers whose personal sites or accounts on
social networking sites register at least 3,000 visits a day should be
entered in a special register. Specifically, they will be allowed to
publish advertisements for a fee.
At the same time, inclusion in this register will require bloggers to
check the information they post, comply with the election campaigning
regulations, refrain from disseminating information on citizens private
life and extremist materials, and state age limits for users.
The law also requires private individuals and legal entities to
notify Roskomnadzor about the dissemination of information in the
Internet and store information on the dissemination of this information
for six months.
The authors of the law believe that bloggers can later be divided in
to categories (blogger, super blogger, star blogger) depending on the
number of their visitors.
Violations of the established regulations will be punishable by a
fine in an amount of 10,000 rubles to 30,000 rubles for private
individuals and 50,000 rubles to 300,000 rubles for legal entities.
Repeat violations committed within a year will lead to a fine in an
amount of 30,000 rubles to 50,000 rubles for citizens and 300,000 rubles
to 500,000 rubles for legal entities or administrative suspension of
operations for a period of thirty days.
