Italian High Court clears the way for dealing with foreign torrent sites

The highest court in Italy has ruled that violating copyright is enough of a justification to be permitted to block access to sites in that country, even if the site is hosted elsewhere. Italian ISPs can be obliged to respond to a call to block torrent sites, reports tweakers.net.

With this conclusion, the High Court overturned a ruling by a lower judge. The court of Bergamo asserted that foreign sites could not be blocked for infringing copyright.  The High Court did not comment on whether access to TPB ought to be blocked.

In a  recently published clarification of the ruling, the High Court states that torrent sites are more than a search engine that only passes on links. Even though torrent sites do not host copyrighted material themselves, these sites are a central hub in the spread of protected content. In doing so, the Court says, sites like TPB play a key role in downloading and uploading of copyrighted material. That the sites are hosted in another country is irrelevant to the Court. What matters is that many Italians use the site.

As mentioned, the high Court did not comment on whether access to TPB should be blocked. That is up to the court in Bergamo to decide. It is clear no, however, that blocking access to such sites is no violation of Italian law.