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On 1 March 2010, the Italian Council of Ministers passed an amended draft legislative decree for the implementation of Directive 2007/65/EC on Audiovisual Media Services (AVMSD), to address the recommendations by the relevant Parliamentary Committees on the Government’s earlier version of the bill, presented on 17 December 2009 (see IRIS 2010-2: 1/25). In the context of the consultations on the original bill, several stakeholders had voiced concerns about the purported extension of the rules on audiovisual media services to private blogs and websites publishing user-generated audiovisual content,...

In its order of 2 February 2010, the Court of Bergamo dismissed the appeal lodged against the order entered by the Court for Preliminary Investigations of Bergamo on 1 August 2008, which imposed a ban on the Swedish BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay, whose owners are facing charges of aiding and abetting, on a profit-making basis, the illegal sharing of copyrighted material in breach of Law No. 633 of 22 April 1941. As per the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure, the Court of Bergamo was bound to apply the principles established by the Italian Court of Cassation in its judgment of 29 September 2009...

On 17 December 2009, the Italian Government issued a draft legislative decree for the implementation of Directive 2007/65/EC on Audiovisual Media Services (AVMSD). The legal basis for the decree is contained in the Legge comunitaria 2008, the annual statute enacted by the Italian Parliament to bring national law into line with EU law. The legislature afforded the Italian Government wide latitude in transposing the AVMSD, as the Parliament restrained itself to opting in favour of product placement. The Government, in turn, has taken advantage of the leeway granted by the Italian legislature, as...

The Tribunale di Milano (Court of Milan) issued a decision concerning the conflict between the private copying exception and technical protection measures (TPM). The case involved a user who wanted to make a copy of a DVD, but was not able to do so because of technological protection measures. This is the first case decided by an Italian court on the relationship between TPM and the private copying exception under EU Directive 2001/29 (the Copyright Directive). The issue, much debated in the doctrine, is the following: “can copyright limitations be overridden by contractual agreements and relative...

On 29 September 2009, the Third Criminal Chamber of the Italian Court of Cassation entered a judgment against the owners of the Swedish BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay, holding that the website could be placed under ‘preventive seizure’ (sequestro preventivo) and Italian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) could be enjoined to block access by their users to the website. The decision of the Court of Cassation is but the latest development in Italy in the criminal investigations brought against the owners of the Swedish website, charged with aiding and abetting, on a profit-making basis, the illegal...