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Rome ruling could slow down web-block campaign in Italy
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 7 April 2014
An appeal court ruling in Rome could slow down the issuing of web-block injunctions in Italy, a country where the forced blocking of copyright infringing websites has become the norm of late, and where communications regulator AGCOM has been given powers to instigate future blockades in a bid to tackle online piracy.
But one site that was targeted by a recent wide-ranging web block order issued by the Public Prosecutor of Rome – which told Italian internet service providers to block 46 torrent, streaming and file-sharing services – took the matter to the Italian capital’s Court Of Appeals, where it received a sympathetic hearing.
Whereas a number of the sites targeted by this latest web-block order seemingly threw in the towel more or less straight away, legal reps for Filmakerz.org took the matter to court. And appeal judges ordered the blockade against the video sharing site be lifted on the basis that the site-wide blockade resulted in legitimate content on the Filmakerz.org platform from being blocked too.
The logical conclusion of that ruling is that web-blocks should be issued against specific copyright infringing content, rather than against entire sites where unlicensed music and videos are available in amongst some legit files.
Though if that principle is now to be applied across the board in Italy it greatly reduces the power of web-blocking, because rights owners would have to issue much more detailed complaints listing specific URLs. And they would likely find that, as soon as they had one set of URLs blocked, the same content would pop up on the same site at different addresses, so that new web-block orders are required again and again.
Basically resulting in the same situation that already occurs for rights owners issuing takedown orders under the American copyright system against sites that inadvertently host infringing content via user-uploads or automated-aggregation. That it’s impossible to issue site-wide takedowns to, say, search engines like Google, against online services that exist primarily to aid infringement is a frequent complaint from the music and movie industries.
The appeals court also said that web-block injunctions should only be issued against sites which are clearly profiting from the infringement they commit or enable, a requirement that has come up in various European jurisdictions before in the ongoing legal battle against file-sharing.
Whether the Filmakerz.org ruling will have wider implications in Italy, and what it may or may not mean for the web-block orders due to be issued by AGCOM, remains to be seen.
