ST. PETERSBURG, May 29 (RAPSI) - The Commercial Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region on Tuesday announced a recess until June 5 in the defamation proceedings between US company Talk Fusion and popular Russian social networking company VKontakte, RIA Novosti reports from the courtroom.
VKontakte owns an extremely popular social networking site Russia's most popular social network, which hosts an audience of over 40 million users daily.
US video communications company Talk Fusion claims that VKontakte blocked the accounts of several users who sold the company's products and that some posts on the VKontakte website are defamatory and damaging to Talk Fusion's business reputation, as they refer to it as a Ponzi scheme. The company also demands that the information posted on the social network by co-defendant Igor Vulfovich, which Talk Fusion considers to be damaging to its business reputation, be deleted.
The court has heard the testimony of witnesses who explained the reasons for blocking Talk Fusion ads and the accounts of its promotion group.
One of the witnesses explained that VKontakte had previously blocked accounts linked to another company deemed to have been operating a Ponzi scheme.
VKontakte representative said the accounts were blocked at the recommendation of company employees who had attended Talk Fusion marketing seminars.
Another VKontakte representative told the court earlier that the service had not published any defamatory information regarding Talk Fusion, but only replied to the users who asked why Talk Fusion ads were blocked.