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Business News Digital Legal
More web-blocks and an ad industry commitment in Italy’s anti-piracy crusade
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 13 June 2014
Italian telecoms regulator AGCOM has ordered net firms in the country to block three file-sharing websites, following a similar order last month to block four online services. According to Torrentfreak, the seven sites so far targeted are: LimeTorrents, TorrentDownload.ws, Torrentz.pro, TorrentDownloads.me, Torrent.cd, Torrentvia and TorrentRoom.
As previously reported, while web-block orders are becoming common in an increasing number of countries, especially in Europe, in the main music and movie companies which want to force ISPs to block access to file-sharing operations must take the matter to court first. However, in Italy AGCOM has been given the power to web-block itself. And it’s using that power.
It’s one of a number of initiatives which is making Italy, where the copyright system was once criticised for failing to help rights owners tackle illegal file-sharing, one of the most proactive countries in the anti-piracy domain. Also this week representatives of Italy’s advertising industry published a ‘memorandum of understanding’ it has signed with the local music and film industries to try and cut off ad revenue from websites that enable or encourage piracy.
Confirming Italian advertisers planned to be more proactive in stopping their ads – and ad revenues – from going to piracy set ups, Carlo Noseda of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Italy said at an event this week: “In a growing digital market, piracy is a huge obstacle: only a secure and ethical web can enable the digital economy to continue to grow, making our country more attractive to investors and therefore creating new opportunities on the economic and employment fronts”.
He went on: “By fighting advertising on pirate websites we eliminate one of the major sources of funding of this parallel market, which threatens the development of a healthy market and the legal drivers of competitiveness for the country system. The goal of this collaboration [with the music and movie industries] is to develop new models of governance of business practices in order to limit the illegality on the web, and to protect content owners, the operators of the advertising market, the investors and even the user”.
These moves in Italy mirror recent work by Mike Weatherley MP, IP Advisor to David Cameron, and the City Of London Police to, as Weatherley puts it, “go after the money” in the battle against piracy.
