The Moscow city court upheld the dismissal of Muscovite Vselovod Sazonov, who was trying to recover from Apple 985 000 rubles for placement on iPhone Emoji depicting same-sex families. About it reported in a press-service of the court.
The grievance of the plaintiff has caused smiles in the new operating system iOS 8.3, some of which contain LGBT symbolism. As explained by Vselovod, he bought her six-year-old son an iPhone 6. After some time the boy asked the father what is the meaning of some emoticons in your phone. Seeing the icons of LGBT symbolism, the man was forced to take the phone from the child.
According to Sazonov, in earlier versions of the iOS operating system such smiles were not — they appeared only in version 8.3. Now the plaintiff insists that the court has banned the sale in Moscow Apple equipment that includes this software. The very same Californian tech giant, says the lawyer, must remove the disputed smilies in the next version.
The judicial panel rejected the claim of the Complainant, who pointed to moral damages due to the fact that their child found the emoticons depicting non-traditional families — two men or two women with a child. “Best single random discovery of the child information on non-traditional relationships is not a violation of the law,” he said in court.
The plaintiff requested to remove all those emoticons, to prohibit its dissemination on the territory of Russia and to pay for his son about a million rubles. In his opinion, these smileys are propaganda of nontraditional relations among minors.
“Production and sales of smartphones with similar images can not be regarded as mentioned kind of propaganda,” — said the press service of the court.
Earlier on LGBT emoticons already drawn the attention of the Deputy of Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg Vitaly Milonov. In his opinion, all this is to ensure that same-sex relationships in the eyes of Russian children was seen as something absolutely normal. If adults in this hard to convince, I’m sure Milonov, the children — much easier.
“If Apple wants to stay on the Russian market, the only acceptable option would be to release a patch that will clean this muck from the operating system, he added. — The company shall respect applicable in the country legislation”.
The law banning propaganda of LGBT movement, one of the authors of the project of which was the Deputy Elena Mizulina, operates in Russia since June 2013.