Italian Yahoo! found responsible for the content being indexed

Blogger Giulio Coraggio draws attention to an interesting judicial precedent, which, he is sure, will generate great resonance and great consequences. The Court of Rome ruled on the responsibility of search services for the content of the links in their issuance.

PFA Films , the copyright of Asgar Farhadi’s film "About Elli" , sued Rome in a lawsuit against Google Italia , Yahoo! Italia and Microsoft (as the owner of Bing ) on the violation of their rights through links to sites that offer to view or download this movie without the permission of the PPA, or simply containing p2p links to it.

The court rejected the requirements for Google Italy and Microsoft, since the Italian divisions of these companies do not play an active role in managing search services. In contrast, the court unexpectedly found that:

• Yahoo !, as a search service provider, is a “caching provider” according to the “ E-commerce Directive 2000/31 / EC ”;
• Yahoo! was notified by the PFA of the violation;
• After removing the link to the movie from its issuance, Yahoo! became partly (contributory) responsible for this violation.

Based on the foregoing, the court ordered Yahoo! remove all references to illegal copies of the film .

The solution is interesting for two reasons:

• This approach will allow the search engines to remove links to content just after a simple notice from the copyright holder;
• it extends the possibility of such requirements not only to links to sites with illegal content, then also to other sites that conduct completely legitimate activities, but contain links to similar illegal sites .

The blogger wonders what responsibility awaits Italy’s Internet service providers in the future? After all, right now there are public consultations organized by AGCOM , the regulator of the Italian telecom, on the adaptation of the American DMCA model to local legislation. So far, everyone there converges on such a mechanism: if the provider or content service, after notifying the copyright holder, does not stop access to illegal content, the copyright holder will contact AGCOM for an investigation involving these three parties. And only after the requirements of AGCOM and the failure to comply with these requirements, can any sanctions be applied to the provider.
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As noted by Slashdot, the whole fault of the search engine comes down to the fact that pirated sites have a higher rating in the issue than sites with legal content, and the search engine sends user traffic "not where it should be". Indeed, if in the search for the movie’s title all the links to the pirate were on the second page and beyond, it would most likely suit the right holders. And there would be no lawsuit.

via dlapiper.com via Slashdot