The Russian law “About the State Regulation of Activities on Gambling” comes into effect tomorrow, forcing many casinos to shut their doors. .

Although Vladimir Putin could not have foreseen the economic crisis when the law was proposed in 2006, the implementation could not have come at a worse time for Russia. An estimated 400’000 people work in the industry and the four designated ‘Las Vegas’ zones have not been built. Although Russia was flooded with new building sites in 2006, many of these have come to a halt due to a lack of finance.

In addition, the immigration quotas have been now been halved to deal with rising unemployment in the country. This has sent many CIS workers central to the building industry back to their countries of origin. Although we have seen some economic recovery this summer, tied to the rising value of commodities, it is unlikely these super-zones will be operational soon.

As I wrote back in March, some of this casinos will try to turn themselves into private poker clubs, taking advantage of reclassification of poker as a sport. However this law will inevitably push more casinos to move online and intensify the competition there.

Technorati Tags: casinos, law, poker, Russia

Gambling companies have welcomed the news that poker is now officially classified as a “sport” in Russia following an order signed March 26 by the Federal Sports Agency head, Vyacheslav Fetisov. On June 26, 2007, Seven-Card Stud Poker, Omaha and Texas Hold’em were officially included in the All-Russia Registry of Sports.

“This game doesn’t have any connection to the gambling business, since in sports poker the players are competing against one another not the casino,” said the Gaming Business Association official. “In Austria, Denmark and several U.S. states, poker has been removed from the list of games of chance.”

By reorganising themselves as “poker clubs” the casinos in Russia have neatly side-stepped the July 1st legislation that would ban gambling outside 4 chosen zones. The government has signed orders creating three such zones: Azov-City, on the border of the Rostov and Krasnodar regions; Sibirskaya Moneta, in Altai; and Yantarnaya, in the Kaliningrad region. An order to create a zone in the far eastern Primorye region has not been signed. None of the zones are due to be ready by July 1st, especially in the current financial climate where funding for new building projects has rapidly evaporated.

It is still unclear how this reclassification of poker may affect online gaming in Russia, which has been in legal limbo since 2006, after the law, “About the State Regulation of Activities on Gambling” was passed. Although this law was targeted at the offline casino industry it contained one sentence which indicated that online gaming would be disallowed.

A further bill, passed in July of the same year did not include the internet as a recognised area where gaming advertising would be prohibited. This caused Yandex and the major search engines in Russia to ban sites which promoted online gaming for money from their contextual advertising systems (PPC).

Technorati Tags: Casino, Gaming, Legal, online gaming, poker

RBC Daily reports on the latest moves by the Russian government to adopt the first ever legal definition of “Internet media”. It will join print media, radio and TV in the Russian law “About Media” and receive the same legal recognition.

According to Senator Vladimir Slutskera, Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Industrial Policy, under the definition of “Internet Media” are all the online versions of traditional media: newspapers, magazines, radio and television, as well as those Internet resources that are voluntarily registered. Internet resources that do not engage in professional journalism, such as online shopping, online profiles, chat rooms, online conferences, personal blogs, social networks, dating sites, clubs and other interests are excluded from the definition.

Anna Artamonova, VP and Director of Marketing and PR Mail.Ru was pleased that the bill was an attempt to define what resources can be considered Internet media, and that all sites were not automatically included. “It’s good that registration of sites as “Internet Media” is voluntary, we unequivocally support and welcome this”.

“Registration and legal registration of Internet media is required to deal with the increased number of legal conflicts and disputes relating to information posted on the Internet”, said Senator Slutskera. “The legal vacuum on these issues and lack of clear legal rules is forcing the courts to be guided by their own subjective assessments”.

According to the senator, this innovation will not restrict the activities of the Internet media, on the contrary, after adopting a “small number of commitments” registered Internet resources will receive substantial privileges and rights comparable with traditional media.

The bill is expected to be submitted to the Russian parliment (Duma) before the end of this year. On Tuesday, its principal provisions were approved by a majority of committee members of the Federation Council on Information Policy.

Technorati Tags: Anna Artamonova, law, Legal, Mail.ru, Russia, Vladimir Slutskera

The first ever Russian lawsuit brought against a BlackHat SEO was dismissed this week in St. Petersberg. The SEO in question had used trademarked terms belonging to other companies in the META tags of their clients’ sites. This was done in an attempt to rank their clients in the SERPs for these trademarked terms. Under Russian law it is forbidden to use another company’s trademark in a domain name or other types of addressing.

However the case was dismissed on the grounds that the court were unable to qualify that HTML code containing the META tags was a “type of addressing” under Part 4 of the Civil Code. This part of the law has been most commonly employed to stop companies using trademarked brands and logos on their packaging, without permission from the trademark holder. As with many internet-related issues, the lawyers found this was a blunt tool to deal with this situation.

Key to the defence was the fact that the contested trademarked terms were not visible on the site itself. Unlike traditional product packaging the META information remains invisible to the general public. Therefore the court had no choice but to find the defendants not guilty.

Blackhat SEO is endemic in Russia, encouraged by the relatively young state of the online marketing industry. While there are some successful brand name agencies, many SEO operators work as freelancers for hire. Low budgets, high client expectations and a lack of knowledge encourage Russian SEOs to look for automated ranking solutions. This is compounded by a lack of filters/penalties in the Russian engines, when compared to Google or Yahoo!

Source: CNews.ru (Russian) and Profy.com

** Blackhat SEO by pittaya one of the artists who release their work under a Creative Commons license at Flickr – thank you!

Technorati Tags: blackhat, blackhat seo, Legal, Russia

This week President Putin introduced a new bill to clamp down on the gambling industry in Russia. The new bill entitled “About the State Regulation of Activities on Gambling” in currently in the project stage and has yet to be passed by the Russian Duma (government).

In regard to offline gambling, the new bill proposes to restrict activities to four chosen regions in Russia, two in the European side, one in Siberia and one in the Far East of the country. Owners of casinos in these regions will need to be Russian and have an operating capital of 600m rubles ($22m)

The part that worries the internet gambling industry is a small sentence in the proposal which promises to “place special restriction on any gambling activity involving the internet or telecommunications”. There is no note on how this may be enforced, to whom or any penalties that may be applied.

As Henry Karpov, an expert on gambling law commented,

Gambling in Runet is certainly under threat, whether this will be applied to both domestic and foreign owned casinos is yet to be seen but we expect some amendments to be made to this proposal before it is made law. The owners of casinos must pay close attention to this proposal and its future developments.

Although this bill seems aimed at the domestic gambling industry in Russia recent clampdowns by the US and Italy can not have gone by unnoticed. We will keep you updated on the progress and development of this project.

Technorati Tags: Casino, Gaming, online gaming