Italian Supreme Court clarifies availability of safe harbours, content of notice-and-takedown requests, and stay-down obligations
Yesterday, the Italian Supreme Court issued two key decisions concerning the liability of intermediaries for third-party IPR infringements. The judgments are: Decision 7708/19 Reti Televisive Italiane SpA v Yahoo! Inc and Decision 7709/19 Reti Televisive Italiane SpA v Yahoo! Inc . The former relates to Yahoo!’s videosharing service, while the latter concerns Yahoo!’s search engine. The Yahoo!'s videosharing service decision is particularly important in that it: clarifies at what conditions a hosting provider would be eligible (and ineligible) for the safe harbour under Italian law (where the divide passive/active host has been subject to extensive discussions in case law and scholarly literature alike); holds that a notice-and-takedown request does not necessarily have to indicate the URLs at which infringing content is to be found (this being yet another contentious issue under Italian law); and finds that a notice-and-taked...