MOSCOW, November 13 (RAPSI) – Telecom regulator Roskomnadzor will add sites with pirated music and books to its black lists starting December 1, Izvestia newspaper writes on Thursday.

An anti-piracy law took effect in Russia on August 1, 2013. It sets out the legal grounds and procedure for limiting access to websites that distribute movies and television shows in violation of copyright. The law currently requires websites to remove pirated content. If they fail to do this by the deadline, access to the site will be blocked by Roskomnadzor.

In May of this year, First Deputy prime Minister Igor Shuvalov chaired a meeting where it was decided that the anti-piracy proposals drafted by the Culture Ministry and the State Duma should be integrated. In July, the lower house held a second hearing of the MPs’ amendments to the law On Information, Information Technology and Information Protection and the Administrative Offences Code. The State Duma ruled that the amendments needed to be improved.

However, the wording presented for the third reading was almost exactly the same as that in the second reading. Izvestia’s source in the State Duma said the government agencies, rights holders and Internet companies failed to come to an agreement and decided that the second version of the bill would be adopted and subsequently improved.

The text of the anti-piracy bill presented for the third reading does not include many of the government agencies’ proposals. “In particular, it does not stipulate that second time offences would be grounds to closed a site, or that sanctions against music pirates would be introduced sooner than 2015,” Izvestia writes. “Blacklisting will be sufficient punishment for any website that posts pirated content, but not for posting pirated photographs or content that has been created by a similar technology.”