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On 6 June 2008, the Italian Parliament converted into law the Decree-Law no. 59/2008 aiming at solving pending infringement procedures with regard to Community law. One of the procedures concerns the ineffectiveness, according to article 3, paragraph 2, of the Directive Television without Frontiers, of the existing provisions regulating the sanctioning procedures to be applied in case of violations of provisions on advertising. The Commission sent a letter of formal notice to Italy on 11 December 2007, pointing out that the height of the sanctions appeared not to be sufficiently dissuasive and...

The Italian Parliament converted the decreto-legge (draft law) n. 59/2008 into Act 101/2008, embodying urgent provisions for the fulfillment of European Community obligations. Recently, on 10 September 2008, the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, according to the provisions of article 8 novies, paragraph V of the mentioned draft law n. 59/2008, signed a Ministerial Act, which contains the timetable for analogue switch-off. In fact, the measure – in order to pursue complete digitisation by 31 December 2012, as required by Italian Law n. 222/2007 – sets a plan for a gradual transition to digital...

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...