TorrentFreak

Last week an Italian court ruled that ISPs should block access to The Pirate Bay. A few days later this block was enforced, but it is doubtful that the blockade will affect the piracy rate at all since other torrent sites are experiencing a massive increase in Italian visitors.

Following a lengthy legal procedure the Court of Bergamo has once again ruled that Italian ISPs have to censor their networks and prevent customer access to The Pirate Bay. Millions of Italian Internet users will be denied access to the popular torrent site in an attempt to prevent copyright infringement.

The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.

Following an order from a prosecutor, last year Italian ISPs started to block subscriber access to the Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay was not planning to go down without a fight though – the decision was appealed and TPB won. Now, several months later, this victory has been nullified by the Supreme Court.

Lawyers from FIMI (Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana) and FPM (Federation against Musical Piracy) say they will sue Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm in Italy, seeking damages in excess of 1 million euros. Their lawyer told TorrentFreak that so far, the prospective defendants have had no official notification.

TNT Village, Italy’s most prominent torrent site has been compromised by hackers. Intimate details of the site’s operations including 50,000 usernames, passwords and email addresses have been leaked out onto the Internet. The site has taken precautionary measures but concerned users should change their passwords immediately.

Anti-piracy groups and lawyers across Europe are unmovable – they say that since they logged a copyright infringement from a particular IP address, the bill payer is responsible. Now a court in Rome has decided that on the contrary, an IP address does not identify an infringer, only a particular connection.