EU regulations block Italian ISPs from blocking Pirate Bay

In August, Italian courts ordered that local ISPs block popular BitTorrent destination The Pirate Bay, but the decision was later overturned in appeal. This week, we found out why the Court of Bergamo ruled as it did.

Italy's recent attempt to block BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay was deemed indefensible under an EU regulation.

At the end of September, an Italian tribunal decided that ISPs were not allowed to block the Pirate Bay. This week, details of that decision were made public. According to those documents, it is not within the power of the Italian courts to unconditionally block a foreign site on the grounds of copyright infringement.

The judgment falls under European Commission directive 2000/31/EC, commonly known as the E-Commerce Directive, which caused some concern in Italy In 2007.

At that time, Italy passed a law that mandated immediate ISP-level blocking of sites found to contain child pornography. But under the E-Commerce Directive, the criminal liability of the ISP is limited, and the Italian government could not force its own ISPs to block content outside of its borders. This was the same condition placed upon the Pirate Bay.

When the order came around, The Pirate Bay posted a blog entry that pointed a finger at Bergamo prosecutor Giancarlo Mancusi, accusing him of being a lackeye of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi is the founder of Fininvest media group, which owns Mediaset, the largest single broadcast media property holder in the country.

In July of this year, Mediaset sued Google for an estimated €500 million for carrying video clips of Mediaset's intellectual property.

Meanwhile, Mancusi oversaw the shutdown of Italy's top Torrent site Colombo-BT. The Pirate Bay said the goal of this litigation was simply to "make it hard to not support Berlusconi's empire." TorrentFreak founder Ernesto, who follows the group's progress closely, announced the group would be appealing the decision.