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Over the past two months the attention of the media and of Peer-to-Peer users has been focused on two recent rulings with which two Italian courts first imposed and subsequently lifted a ban on the popular Swedish BitTorrent tracker website Pirate Bay. By its decree of 1 August 2008, the Giudice Per le Indagini Preliminari (Court for Preliminary Investigations) of Bergamo placed the said website under preventive seizure (Sequestro preventivo) on the basis of Article 321 of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure. This interim measure was adopted in the context of criminal investigations against...

On 22 August 2008, the General Direction for Cinema, according to the provisions of the third paragraph of Article 88 of the EC Treaty, formally notified the European Commission of new measures containing fiscal incentives for film production and distribution companies. The relevant paragraph – which deals with state aid – provides that, “The Commission shall be informed, in sufficient time to enable it to submit its comments, of any plans to grant or alter aid. If it considers that any such plan is not compatible with the common market having regard to Article 87, it shall without delay initiate...

In its decision of 28 February 2008, the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali (the Italian Data Protection Authority) outlawed the use by private companies of a software designed to monitor, for the purpose of identifying and suing them, the activities of peer-to-peer (P2P) users that share copyrighted files on the Internet. The decision of the Garante was adopted in the broader context of the controversial “Peppermint case”. The genesis of the case dates back to 2007, when the German record label Peppermint Jam Records GmbH (Peppermint) and the Polish videogame developer...

On 28 July 1999, the competent Italian authorities granted Centro Europa 7 the terrestrial television broadcasting rights on the national level, authorising the installation and the use of a television network utilising analogue technology, according to the provisions of act 249/1997. The administrative measure did not allocate Centro Europa 7 the specific radio frequencies. In fact, in order to be allocated frequencies for such broadcasting activities, Centro Europa 7 had to await the national allocation plan for radio frequencies. In the event, however, the national allocation plan for radio...

According to the Television Without Frontiers Directive (Directive 89/552/EEC, as amended by Directive 97/36/EC), teleshopping comes in the form of either teleshopping spots or teleshopping windows: the former are subject to an hourly 12-minute limit, whereas the latter are required to be longer than 15 minutes. Conversely, under Italian law prior to November 2007, teleshopping was required to have a minimum duration of 3 minutes and was not subject to the hourly 12-minute limit, which only applied to advertising spots. This was one of the reasons which led the European Commission toinitiate a...