(1) The Court of Rome found TMFT Enterprises LLC- Break Media ("Break Media") liable for copyright infringement for the unauthorized streaming of audiovisual content to which Reti Televisive Italiane S.p.A. ("RTI") owned the copyright. (2) The Court supported its decision basically on two arguments: Identification of the activity of Break Media as "active hosting" and not just "passive hosting". According to the Court, Break Media is not a simple host of media content but a sophisticated content-provider. Indeed, the activity of Break Media is not limited to the activation of technical procedures for enabling the content to be loaded to the platform ("passive hosting"), but requires of a complex and sophisticated organization of advertising exploitation of the content loaded to the platform which is selected, addressed...
(prepared by Swiss Institute of Comparative Law for Council of Europe)
This is one of series of country reports prepared for the Council of Europe in 2015. Other countries' reports, and responses from national governments, are available here. The studies undertake to present the laws and, in so far as information is easily available, the practices concerning the filtering, blocking and takedown of illegal content on the internet.
The Court of Appeal reversed an earlier decision (see below). The appelate decision clarified that RTI had the obligation to indicate in a "detailed, precise and specific manner" the videos that Yahoo! had to remove. Additionally, in view of the Court of Appeal, the court of first instance did not have the power to "impose to a hosting provider general orders or, even worse, general monitoring obligations, which are forbidden by Directive 2000/31/EC." Intermediary liability may arise only if the hosting provider does not act promptly upon a "detailed, precise and specific" notice. Actually, RTI never sent this notice to Yahoo!, therefore the appelate court found in favor of Yahoo! and rejected RTI's claims. See also CIS Blog
(1) Italian politicians Antonio Angelucci and his son claimed that Wikipedia pages related to the Angeluccis contained false statements supposedly harming the family’s reputation. The allegedly defamatory statements referred to bribery scandals involving the Angeluccis. Although, upon notice of Angelucci’s claim, Wikimedia removed the allegedly defamatory information, the Angeluccis sought €20,000,000 in damages from the Wikimedia Foundation. The plaintiffs argued that Wikimedia should be treated like a content provider, rather than hosting, and should be liable under the stricter standard that apply to the Italian press as an online journal. (2) The Court of Rome rejected plaintiffs' argument and stated that Wikimedia Foundation serves as a hosting provider in managing the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Therefore, the...
(1) The Tribunal of Rome ordered Internet Service Providers to block access in Italy to the ip addresses of 24 websites hosting copyrighted content without the rightsholders’ consent. (2) Acting upon a claim of a small Italian independent distributor, the Italian authorities started a large-scale anti-piracy operation, labelled “Operation EyeMoon,” that lead to the injunction issued by the Roman court. (3) The blocking order includes well known illegal movie streaming websites, such as cineblog01.net, cineblog01.tv, ddlstorage.com, divxstage.eu, easybytez.com, filminstreaming.eu, filmstream.info, firedrive.com, movshare.sx, nowdownload.ag, nowdownload.sx, nowvideo.sx, piratestreaming.net, primeshare.tv, putlocker.com, rapidvideo.tv, sockshare.com, uploadable.ch, uploadinc.com, video.tt, videopremium.me, youwatch.org....
(1) The associations for the defense of freedom of information as well as those representing web-tv, micro web-tv, micromedia hyperlocal, blogs and video blogs, information portals, aggregators and video companies active in the online press are entitled to challenge AGCOM Regulations regarding Online Copyright Enforcement (AGCOM Regulation). (2) The AGCOM Regulation does not primarily enforce copyright but any failure to comply with an order of the Authority. Therefore, this order cannot be considered illegitimate for (a) AGCOM's incompetence to introduce a para-judicial procedure to enforce copyright or (b) inconsistency between this procedure and the rules of law which entrust to the ordinary courts the enforcement of copyright, or even, for (c) breach of the principle of the judge previously ascertained by law in so...