Mamma Mia! Italian Ruling on Piracy Puts Websites on Notice

Italy is rightly famous for many things great food, glorious history, boring soccer but in the past few years its also developed a reputation for antagonizing the worlds biggest Internet companies. Legal actions targeted at the likes of Google and Facebook have created a fractious relationship between the government and leading technology brands.

In the case, heard by Romes ninth circuit, the makers of the award-winning Iranian film drama About Elly sued Yahoo. The movies Italian distributor, PFA, claimed that pirated clips and links to illegal film downloads were appearing in Yahoo Video searches and demanded that the company remove the videos from the search results. When Yahoo didnt respond, the case was taken up by Open Gate, a regulatory lobby group run by Tullio Camiglieri, a former journalist and executive in Rupert Murdochs Sky Italia.

According to this report in Reppublica, one of Italys leading newspapers, the complaint centered on the argument that PFAs right to profit from About Elly was undermined, since Yahoo search results were prioritizing bootlegs over the legitimate version of the film. The films official website was not even in the top positions, argued attorneys, who also pointed out that it was ranked lower than links to pages that allowed users to illegally download the movie.

The judge agreed with PFA! and, in his ruling, ordered Yahoo to do more to inhibit copyright infringement. If his ruling holds, it could put search engines on notice that they are responsible for links to illegal downloads.

Its a move that not only holds Yahoo liable, but could spark further action: Camiglieri, the president of Open Gate, said that this opened the way for his company to lead action against Google and YouTube in Italy over similar claims. (Whether it will work is unclear: Google already uses digital fingerprinting techniques to filter out some pirated material, even though a U.S. court ruled in its favor after a $1 billion lawsuit by Viacom, brought amid similar claims).

Its far from the first time that the Italian courts have taken a search service to task for what it sees as an invasion of rights. Google has been involved in a number of lawsuits there most notably when three executives were found guilty of violating privacy laws after YouTube failed to prevent a gang of teenage bullies from uploading a video. Meanwhile the Pirate Bay has been locked in a long-running dispute over its legality, and is subject to an on-again, off-again, on-again block on its service. These cases are all different, but the search engines have countered in similar ways: that they cant be held responsible for monitoring the legality of search results and that doing so would be prohibitively expensive.

Its worth pointing out that the ruling in this case doesnt force Yahoo, or other search services, to police material themselves. In fact, the court specifically recognized that content policing of this sort would be impossible. Where Yahoo went wrong, according to the Italian court, was in failing to act on the alleged infringement after it was notified of it. The court ruling, then, requires Yahoo to act once its given eviden! ce of in fringement, regardless of whether actual infringement has occurred.

This is a particularly important decision since, right now, Italy is undertaking a a public consultation to decide whether it needs an equivalent to the U.S.s notorious Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Theres currently nothing of the sort in Italy, aside from isolated cases, but judgments such as this might make such a system more likely.

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