Prevention of the law infringements on the Internet is no longer a futile theoretical objective. When hearing such cases, the courts successfully apply the Russian law and the evidence acceptable from the procedural viewpoint. Before going to court, it is important to collect the evidence in support of corpus delicti.
Before going to court in relation to any offences on the Internet, one has to collect and perpetuate, first of all, the evidence in support of corpus delicti. Today the best available way of perpetuating the evidence of any offence on the Internet is providing a notarial certification of the web pages.
A mere page print-out (with no notarial certification) is not accepted, as a rule, by Russian courts as evidence. The notarially secured evidence must be recognised as an acceptable one, provided it is obtained in compliance with the procedural law standards.
A party interested in having the violations certified (for instance, using a domain name for a website offering for sale any goods the plaintiff has a legal protection of in conformance with the trademark law) files a request with a Notary Public demanding to certify the fact of any such information being located under a certain address on the Internet.
The Notary Public finds the page, prints it out and makes sure it contains the materials including the said details. It is desirable that the automatic mode printing should reflect the printing date and file address, while the web page should be printed out in full in the way it is presented to a site visitor.
By collating the page address and the text or object details, the Notary Public prepares notary action report on securing evidence in writing by accessing a web page with its further review under the procedure as per Section 18, Article 35 and Articles 102 and 103 of the Fundamentals of Legislation of the Russian Federation on Notaries. The page print-outs shall be attached to the contract.
A Notary Public secures only the evidence related to a dispute at its pre-judicial stage (Article 72 of the Commercial Procedure Code of the Russian Federation and Article 57 of the Code of Civil Procedure of the Russian Federation), before the case is reviewed under an administrative procedure.
For more information on the procedure of perpetuating evidence for offences on the Internet, please refer to the legal section of the information resource info.nic.ru [in Russian].