Comments on GamingTechLAW: Italian Court ignores ISPs liability rules in a Yo...

Hi Paul, Thanks for your comment. I confirm that ...

2009-12-27T15:27:09.973+01:00

Hi Paul,
Thanks for your comment. I confirm that this decision has raised lots of negative comments from Internet law experts.
Indeed, it is very surprising that the court did not take into account the efforts made by YouTube which was willing to remove the challenged videos and to this purpose required in several instances RTI to provide a list of such videos without receiving any answer from them.
I will monitor "very closely" the next steps of the proceeding and keep you posted.
Best,
Giulio

IMHO, this ruling has NOTHING to do with the law, ...

2009-12-25T00:01:29.934+01:00

IMHO, this ruling has NOTHING to do with the law, but instead corruption, politics and greed. Namely the greed of the Italian Prime Minister, Berlusconi. Giulio, being in Rome, do you not see this as part of the reasoning for a decision like this?

Essentially, to me this is either a personal play for power, money or both by Berlusconi. It does not surprise me AT ALL. Every Supreme Court judge is in his pocket, he owns the almost all major media outlets in the country. I'm not a lawyer but I don't think this is a credible legal opinion you should try and rationally understand.

For those not aware of the political and personal history of Silvio Burlesconi and think that I'm overreacting, do some research on him over the last 15 years. Fixed elections, quashing other Italian media outlets, sex scandals, suppression of free speech to further his conglomerate, fixing court cases, including those brought against him personally, mafia ties, the outrage by the other EU countries when it was Italy's turn to head up the union. It goes on and on....search Google for "berlusconi corrupt" and prepare to read for a while, it really is quite an amazing story.

Dear Darius, Thanks for your comment. Maybe I wa...

2009-12-24T10:28:31.600+01:00

Dear Darius,

Thanks for your comment. Maybe I was not enough clear in my post.

Google was willing to remove the videos on which RTI claimed its rights and requested several times RTI to provide the identification codes of such videos to be able to identify such videos and remove them. However, RTI has never replied to such requests!

As stressed in my post, Google cannot remove all the videos that appear from a search using the words "grande fratello" since RTI might not hold any right on some of these videos and because RTI's claim referred only to the 10th edition of the show which means that they did not request the removal of the videos concerning the previous editions of the same show.

I believe that the request from RTI would imply the use of huge resources by YouTube since it shall check one by one all the videos posted on the platform that "might" have contents extracted from the 10th edition of the Big Brother with the risk that this practice is accurate and might lead to the removal of non-infringing videos.

Finally, the E-Commerce Directive expressly states that hosting providers (including YouTube) are not obliged to monitor the contents published by their user and the reasoning behind this provision is that it is impossible for them the performance of such monitoring activity because a huge amount of information is published every second on their platforms.

Indeed, I believe that the court completely ignored the provisions of the E-Commerce Directive and their rationale.

Resources and tools are already provided to index ...

2009-12-24T01:42:42.274+01:00

Resources and tools are already provided
to index any text in title field
and remove it from circulation and indexing,
public access.

Easy job developed by Google and others,
in commong use for the last 20 years on the Internet.