Russia wants to tax website owners

The Russian Authors' Society (RAO) wants to demand royalties from websites in the .RU and .РФ domains.

The corresponding amendments to the legislation were made to the Civil Code.

Specifically, the amendments state that the Russian Authors' Society (RAO) wants to receive payments from website owners for distributing and listening to copyrighted content.

Essentially, the idea was put forward to empower RAO with the functions of collective copyright management, which would mean that RAO could collect money for playing music on websites or social networks.

However, the document does not specify how exactly the fees will be collected, what percentage RAO expects to receive, or what to do with musicians' websites. Experts note that this provision of the law will negatively impact the development of the Russian internet segment, where website owners will migrate their resources to the .COM domain or similar domains.