Last December, the Specialized Sections of the Civil Court of Rome ruled again on a RTI vs Google case, this time for the publication by a user of the Blogger platform, of streaming videos of football matches of the Italian league, Series A and UEFA Champions League.
In its ruling, the judge provided two seemingly conflicting orders of reasons:
- On the one hand, the decision describes the complex relationship between the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and user posting the contents: Traditionally, the ISP has always been considered a “mere conduit” as per legislative decree n.70/2003: accordingly, liability has always been excluded , except when, notified of a wrongful use of its services, the ISP has not complied to removal requests in the shortest time possible. In this case, however, modern ISPs participated actively in the organization and management of contents posted by its users, providing indexing and allowing users to access related videos, and also drawing financial support from such activities, via dedicated advertising banners. Furthermore, and this is not at all irrelevant, usually an ISP contractually reserves all rights to control, exclude contents and interrupt their distrubution, where service is losing its economic advantage or is used differently from contractual provisions.
- On the other hand, the judge again denied the existance of an obligation for the ISP to act “preemptive controls” on content posted by its users, and has also rejected the demand for such monitoring issued by RTI since Google, as soon as the violation was reported, had immediately removed the pirate blog, thereby fulfilling its obligations.
Apart from the present denial to impose the measures sought by RTI, it appears that the issue is far from resolved, because the definition (so to speak) of a new “ISP 2.0 “, which may not be regarded as “mere conduit”, could be ground for further legal controversy between the television company and the webserch giant, to debate again whether or not to adopt a pattern of widespread realtime/preemptive control for content uploaded by individual users of Google services.”