A Far East court has banned YouTube and four other web sites for “extremist” content in a ruling that promises to raise new worries about free speech.
The Internet is widely recognized as the last uncensored media in Russia, and the ruling nudges the country toward the likes of Iran and Pakistan, which have blocked YouTube.
Incidentally, the court's decision also bans videos by President Dmitry Medvedev.
[Our emphasis] The Komsomolsk-on-Amur City Court said Rosnet, a Khabarovsk region Internet provider, must block three online libraries — Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru — as well as YouTube.com and Web.archive.org, [the Internet Archive] which stores archived copies of old and deleted web pages.
YouTube.com was banned for the nationalist video "Russia to Russians," which was ruled extremist by a Samara court in November and subsequently placed on the Justice Ministry's federal list of banned extremist materials.
The other four sites contained Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," blacklisted by an Ufa court in March.
Once added to a list of extremist materials, a book or video can only be removed by another court ruling. The list, first published in July 2007, has since swelled from an initial 14 items to 686.
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The provider said it has proposed several ways to filter the illegal content without blocking access to the entire web sites, but the court has ignored all alternatives.
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YouTube's parent company, Google, denounced the ruling as unconstitutional. "In our opinion, the court's decision … to limit access of Rosnet users to the whole YouTube.com site, not to a particular video, breaches the right for freedom of information, guaranteed by Article 29 of Russia's Constitution," Google spokeswoman Alla Zabrovskaya said in an e-mailed statement.
YouTube can remove illegal videos after a simple request is submitted to its moderator, she added.
The company is not going to appeal but will follow the case, Zabrovskaya said.
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