Russian president signed the amendments into Criminal Code to toughen responsibility for copyright violation. According to the new law pirates could be sentenced up to 5-6 years imprisonement and punitive penalties up to 500,000 rubles. Still there is a strong opinion that changes will only make way for a new kind of mass court business, the same with recent changes in Civil Code.

Softline, a software vendor in Russia and CIS, has acquired a gaming community XboxRussia.ru. The community counts about 2500 users interested in Microsoft game console. With this acquisition Softline plans to launch an online marketplace for licensed games distribution and to offer new services to Russian gaming community.

The turnover of digital music content in Russia totals $38,4m in 2006, including $37,7m sales of ringtones and realtones. With this figure cellular networks perform about one third of total legal music sales in Russia, according to recent Intermedia report. Online music stores managed to gain only $193,500 selling legal content (Intermedia estimations based on rightholders' reports). Although the piracy level is still high on Russian web, experts admit that legal music market has been eastablished. "Two years ago the market didn't exist at all. A dozen of legal stores appeared only in 2006, they sell content directly from rightholders or legal distributors", - says Igor Pozhitkov from IFPI Russian office. Andrey Lukinov from Real Records expects the legal sales would reach 40-50% of total online music stores turnover this year.

Savva Terentyev, a musician from Syktyvkar, Komi republic, was questionned by city police and undertaken to stay in town. Earlier police visited his apartment and seized his computer. He was accused of 'arousing social discord' after he had commented a post in LiveJournal blog of Syktyvkar's journalist Boris Suranov. In this comment he sweared police workers and suggested 'to burn a policeman a day' as a regular ceremony in every Russian city. Earlier Boris Suranov and few other bloggers from Syktyvkar were taken to regional police offices after an anonymous account on behalf of Komi's head appeared on LJ.

A killing discussion between Russian online leaders occured during 'Internet and Business' conference, held April 19-20 near Moscow. When asked if Google would come and buy everything on the Russian web, Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin answered, "Google's not going to buy, it's going to kill. And Yandex would be its primary victim. After a time there would be a space only for Mail.ru - Google to provide web serch while Mail.ru to remain web service leader".

Arkadiy Volozh, the head of Yandex, reasoned that the question is as old as Russian web. "Google came in, localized its products and gained 11% search traffic. It made none of serious revision on the market. After global players like Yahoo and MSN expand in Russia that would make a competition", he said. Meanwhile sources say, Microsoft is already negotiating with leading online media on content partnership to launch 'Russian MSNBC' on msn.com.