Business News Digital Legal

Italian court considers how quickly takedown systems must respond to assure safe harbour protection

By | Published on Monday 6 June 2016

Kewego

With the European Commission likely to instigate a conversation about what takedown systems should look like, in response to the ongoing safe harbours debate, the IPKat blog last week reported on a recent ruling in the Italian courts on that very issue.

As much previously reported, the safe harbours are designed to protect internet companies whose customers use their tools and platforms to distribute copyright material without licence. The rule goes that said net firms aren’t liable for any copyright infringement that occurs on their platforms, providing they have a system to place to block infringing content whenever made aware of it.

In the main, safe harbour laws in Europe and the US don’t provide too much guidance on what those takedown systems should look like, and the efficiency of such systems varies greatly from platform to platform. Courts in the US and Europe have been inconsistent on how efficient the takedown process should be, though in many case pretty shoddy systems have been deemed sufficient.

Italian TV company RTI sued French video platform Kewego in 2012 through the court of first instance in Rome, after the former found its content on the latter’s site. Kewego pleaded safe harbour, leading to the customary debate about what kinds of platforms actually deserve that kind of protection. Though there was a second argument too: RTI showed that it had first issued a takedown request against Kewego on 14 Jul 2011, and it took the platform until 19 Sep that year to start removing the uncleared content.

Italian law, based on the European E-Commerce Directive from which EU safe harbours originate, says that platforms must “expeditiously” remove or disable infringing content once made aware of it. But what the hell does that mean? Well, faster than a two month turnaround it seems, even if the rights owner hasn’t provided full URL information about the offending content, which RTI seemingly had not.

Writes IPKat: “According to the court, this delay could not be justified by either the need to acquire information about the users who had uploaded the contents in question or the material removal of such contents. The court concluded that Kewego should be liable for the damages caused to the claimant by such delay, but left their actual determination to a later stage”.



READ MORE ABOUT: |