The opposition continued attacks on state-controlled NTV on Monday over the television station's contentious documentary alleging that demonstrators received money for anti-Kremlin protests.
Demokratichesky Vybor, or Democratic Choice, filed two lawsuits accusing the channel of breaching copyright and libel laws, its deputy head, Igor Drandin, wrote on his Twitter feed Monday.
The movement, headed by prominent opposition leader and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, claims in the lawsuits that the authors of the documentary used opposition video from a pro-Putin rally without permission and without crediting the author.
In addition, the organization claims that the video contained inaccurate information.
"We are seeking 120,000 rubles ($4,100) in damages in the first suit and an aired retraction in the second one," Drandin told Gazeta.ru.
The 36-minute documentary titled "Anatomy of Protest" was broadcast by NTV on Thursday and Sunday.
The film suggests that some people at recent mass opposition rallies had been hired to demonstrate for fair elections and against the re-election of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
It also hints that the organizers were supported by the United States.
Earlier Sunday, former co-chairman of the Right Cause party Boris Nadezhdin announced that he had filed a defamation lawsuit against NTV.
The video has fueled more protests, the biggest of which attracted about 1,000 people to the Ostankino television tower Sunday.
More than 100 of them were detained. They had been released by Monday morning.
The channel's website, NTV.ru, has been experiencing continual distributed-denial-of-service attacks since Thursday. On Monday, the site was down for almost 12 hours, Interfax reported.
In St. Petersburg, six Yabloko party youth activists gathered outside the local NTV headquarters Monday to eat noodles, a reference to the Russian expression "to hang noodles on someone's ears," which is the equivalent of the English "to pull someone's leg."
Police officers "asked us to eat somewhere else," Yulia Alimova of Yabloko told Fontanka.ru. "We refused, and they left us alone."
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