Hours after Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, blocked the adult video site Brazzers, the same government agency unblocked YouPorn, another even more popular online resource for pornography.
“We’ve removed the page on the website YouPorn from the state registry [for banned websites] after receiving a decision to cancel the verdict by a Vladivostok court,” Roskomnadzor said in a press release.
Russian censors first blocked YouPorn on Sept. 14, 2016, the same day they also banned PornHub.
Late last month, a Russian lawyer named Alexei Klyotskin (working with a Canadian international law firm hired by YouPorn) convinced a Russian appeals court that YouPorn had been blocked illegally.
According to a report by the technology website VC.ru, the entire evidence against YouPorn was a single document stating that a prosecutor’s aide had used his Samsung Galaxy 5 to confirm the existence of pornography at the URL youporn.com.
“[YouPorn] was looking for a lawyer who could help them on the ground, in Vladivostok, and they came to me. After having a look at the case, we discovered a series of violations, one of which was the failure to involve the defendant in the trial. It was only in the media that the website’s owner even found out that YouPorn had been blocked,” Klyotskin told VC.ru
The mere distribution of pornography in Russia is not illegal, Klyotskin argued, and prosecutors would need to prove that YouPorn is distributed to children, in order to claim that the website breaks the law.
The ban on YouPorn was overturned in mid-January, but Roskomnadzor only removed the website from its blacklist this Tuesday. Ironically, this was the same day it blocked Brazzers, another popular adult site, for allegedly “negative influence on the human psyche.”
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