Vladimir Putin may be no friend to cathedral-storming agit-pop groups, gay people or protestors in general. But he’s finding favour with the creative industries in Russia through a series of anti-piracy measures this year. A blacklist of piracy sites and heavy fines for ISPs and search engines that don’t block them have already been implemented. Now TorrentFreak reports that the Russian government is preparing to adopt different policies for pure piracy sites and those (like YouTube and vKontakte) that are mainly legal, but which can have infringing content uploaded. The former category are set to be blanket-blocked. “There are some specialized and entirely pornographic sites that are entirely blocked by IP address. The same principle will be observed in respect of torrents and sites engaged in outright piracy,” said ministry of communications deputy Alexei Volin. “We will not block them for some particular things, we’ll close them entirely by IP address.”
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