Court of Appeal Rome: no monitoring requirement for hosting provider Yahoo

The Roman Court today ruled that search engines do not need to identify and remove search results that refer to alleged "pirate" sites.

The intellectual property section of the Rome Court overturned a previous decision of the Roman court. The lower courts rulung held Italia Yahoo responsible for removing all search results that refer to illegal streaming sites or sites (illegal) copies of the Iranian film "About Elly" to download. The terms "About Elly" could only refer to the official website of the movie, was the verdict.

The reversed decision was based on a provision in the European eCommerce Directive that prescribes that hosting providers, such as Yahoo, are not liable for the information they store at the request of users, where they act directly to remove to illegal information once they have been notified accordingly. Any such notification should however indicate the exact location (URL) of the infringing information.

The Italian distributor of "About Elly", PFA Movies, Yahoo! Italia had however only been generally requested to remove links to sites where infringing copies of the film could be obtained or viewed, without providing the exact locations from the search results that ought to be removed.

See here for the appeal ruling and the lower verdict here (in Italian, PDF)

Source: Out-law.com