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Court fines Apple $8,915 for refusing to remove ‘Mein Kampf’ from Apple Books app

The hearing took place behind closed doors at Apple’s request, since the case contained materials constituting a commercial secret

MOSCOW, January 23. /TASS/. The Tagansky District Court of Moscow fined Apple 800,000 rubles ($8,915) for refusing to remove the book "Mein Kampf" (Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, which is included on the list of extremist content in Russia) from the Apple Books application, a TASS correspondent reported from the courtroom.

"The court decided to find Apple Distribution International guilty of an offense under Part 2 of Article 13.41 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation (failure of the owner of a website to delete information or a web-page when the obligation to delete such information, such a web page, is included in the legislation of the Russian Federation) and impose a penalty on this entity in the form of a fine in the amount of 800,000 rubles," the judge announced.

The hearing took place behind closed doors at Apple’s request, since the case contained materials constituting a commercial secret.

In accordance with the decision of the prosecutor's office of the republic of Bashkortostan in 2010, Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" was recognized as extremist in Russia and was prohibited from being distributed. However, Russian users could read it in the Apple Books application.

This is not the first time Apple has found itself in hot water in Russia for failing to remove banned content. In August 2023, Magistrate Court District No 422 fined the company 400,000 rubles ($4,466) for refusing to remove false information about the special military operation in Ukraine from two podcast websites. The day before it became known that Apple paid an antitrust fine of about 1.2 billion rubles ($13.4 mln) for forcing Russian iOS application developers to use Apple’s payment instrument.