Italian Courts find 'active hosting liability' for ISPs

Our good Friend from the City University, Dr. Enrico Bonadio, has kindly sent us details of the link to a brief case note which Enrico co-authored with his colleague Mauro Santo, and which has been published in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice.

As Enrico explains "It is a comment of two decisions of the Court of Milan in case of copyright liability of Internet Service Providers: In June and September 2011 the Court of Milan released two interesting decisions in the field of liability of Internet Service Providers for copyright infringement committed by their users. In particular, the Court found that the Internet Service Providers Italia On Line and Yahoo! Italia were liable for copyright infringement in connection with the uploading of several videos on their platforms and that they could not rely on the hosting provider exemption under the E-Commerce Directive. The two decisions are particularly interesting as the Court of Milan ‘created’ from scratch a new category of internet service provider liability: so-called active hosting liability."

If you want more on this topic, you need to take a look at the ever excellent Journal of Intellectual Law & Practice

This is the SSRN link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1977431

For a Spanish take - and a rather different approach - have a look at http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/legal-and-management/is-pablo-soto-spain-s-p2p-robin-hood-or-1005743952.story with the Spanish courts finding no liability for software developer Pablo Soto for the in fringing uses made of his software - as Spain's new Government struggles to implement the so called "Sinde" law it inherited from the previous government in the face of public opposition.