©-LAW

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...

Kilari and Valentina Ponzone For the first time under Italian law a platform (Facebook) has been found liable for hosting third- party links to unlicensed content.   The decision was issued by the Rome Court of First Instance a few days ago: it is  Tribunale di Roma, sentenza 3512/2019 . The judgment is both interesting and important, also considering the  YouTube  referral (C-682/18)   currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)  [Katpost  here ] .  Let's see more in detail what happened and how the Rome court reasoned. Background Broadcaster Reti Televisive Italiane SpA (RTI) and singer Valentina Ponzone sued Facebook over the creation, on the latter, of a profile that hosted unlicensed videos and defamatory comments relating to Ms Ponzone's performance of the  intro to the Italian version of Japanese animated TV series  Kilari . The profile also con...