The owner of pharmacy product sellers chain Glavmed.com, Igor Gusev, filed a defamation of character lawsuit against Axel Springer Russia. Among defendants are the chief editor of “Russian Newsweek” Michail Fishman and the authors of the article called “Evil Cyber-empire” where Gusev was called a spammer and a seller of infringing products. Gusev says the magazine has to publish a denial and pay an indemnity of 700 thousand rubles.

At preliminary hearings, the suitor didn’t manage to prove that it was him, who had been described in the article. According to an “Axel Springer” legislative director Maria Sakulina, new hearings will be held at the end of June, says Marker.ru.

The attack on Glavmed.com began last autumn, when spammers' forum Spamdot.biz was shut down under strange circumstances (as it were Federal Security Sevice). Days later, Russian Association of Electronic Communications declared the start of an extensive campaign against spam. There were mentioned Glavmed.com and Spamdot.biz again.

Some our sources think that together with this lawsuit against Newsweek, the “Glavmed” owner initiated a media fightback to those who might have organized the attack. Back in March, the member of State Duma Ilya Ponomarev suddenly filed the complaint to Russian law enforcement asking to investigate the past of Pavel Vrublevsky, currently the member of anti-spam group at Russian Ministry of Telecommunication. Ponomarev says that Vrublevsky was a creator of crutop.nu, the site for adult webmasters, and some other illegal stuff on the Internet.

In his interview to Krebsonsecurity.com, Pavel Vrublevsky suggested that one of his enemies had paid Ponomarev to write the letter to investigators. Ponomarev dismissed the claim that someone paid him.

The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation says the Internet mass media have to edit their users’ comments. Otherwise, editors will be responsible for the messages left on their forums, or comments made to their articles.

This week Plenum of the Supreme Court is planning to accept draft regulations, where all the responsibilities of the Internet mass media for users’ comments, will be preconditioned. The decree had to be approved long ago, but the comment responsibility issue delayed the process.

Now online mass media will have to spend time and efforts, to read thoroughly the comments to their publications. If they don’t respond to claims on the issue of comments, they will be brought to responsibility.