Many of the big ‘pirate’ sites – The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, for example – have been blocked for years but now the country seems intent on blacking out sites that are definitely not in the piracy business.

As reported here on Saturday, last week a judge sitting in the Court of Rome ordered local ISPs to block a total of 24 websites including Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz and Russia’s largest email provider, Mail.ru.

The size and importance of Mail.ru in its home country and further afield is noteworthy. It’s the fifth most-visited domain in Russia behind only Yandex, Google and social networking giant vKontakte, of which it owns 51.99%. It’s the 39th busiest site worldwide according to Alexa, servicing in excess of 27 million users per day.

In a statement this morning Mail.ru said it has still not been able to establish the specifics that lead to it being blocked in Italy. Eyemoon Pictures, the complainant in the case, made no attempt to discuss any issues with Mail.ru before heading off to court, the email giant said.

“[Eyemoon Pictures] made no attempt to resolve the situation pretrial,” the company said in a statement.

“No notification of illegal content or requirements to remove copies of [Eyemoon's] films has been addressed to Mail.Ru Group from law enforcement agencies and Italy.”

The company only realized there was a problem when users began complaining of accessibility issues on July 17.

“We learned of the court’s decision from our users, as well as publications in the public domain,” Mail.ru added.

Criticizing the effects of the blockade on its userbase, this morning Mail.ru hit out at Italy for taking action without due consideration.

“We believe that this situation is detrimental to the interests of our users, and clearly illustrates the fact that some national laws in this area does not consider the specifics of the Internet companies and do not provide a clear, transparent process for resolving such conflicts,” the company said.

“There needs to be an active dialogue on the development of international pre-trial procedures for resolving disputes between copyright holders and Internet service providers. Their introduction will improve the position of all parties, including users worldwide,” Mail.ru concludes.

At the time of writing, Mail.ru is still inaccessible in Italy with the company having made no progress towards having the censorship lifted.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Over in Russia the pressure being placed upon site owners has increased dramatically in recent times, so much so that yesterday some of the countries largest web companies published an open letter directed at the entertainment industries and lawmakers.

Google, mail service Mail.ru, social networking site Vkontakte, and search engines Yandex and Rambler released a joint statement Friday asking copyright holders to cease legal action against them over unauthorized content stored or linked to by their services.

The companies say that it is end users who are responsible for the posting of copyright works and as such it is they who should be held liable. Furthermore, they claim it is impossible to monitor millions of users to ensure their every act is legal.

The entertainment industries do not accept this line and insist that web companies should keep their systems free of copyright works, if necessary by employing teams of people to do so.

The five companies say that the law has failed to keep up with developments on the web and clarification is needed. Unlike other parts of the world, current Russian legislation does not indicate who can be held accountable for unauthorized content placed on Internet services.

“In Europe, the USA and other countries, the limitation of liability of information intermediaries in such situations was legally settled more than ten years ago,” the companies write.

In order to help bridge this gap, the site owners are offering rightsholders the opportunity to settle disputes indirectly with alleged copyright infringers. Once a complaint is received, site operators would suspend access to the material in question and inform the user/uploader of the complaint. The user would then have the chance, through the site operator, to dispute the claim with the rightsholder.

“We believe that, with the above procedure, the owners of Internet services should not be responsible for the content posted by users,” the companies write in the letter.

Having this type of takedown policy would hopefully avoid situations such as the one Vkontakte currently finds itself in. The social networking giant is currently being sued by Gala Records for around $22,000 because users uploaded songs by Russian pop stars to the site.

Last week, a British citizen was arrested over his involvement with the Mulve software which allowed users to make a search and download music from Vkontakte’s servers.

The letter comes at a time when a bill concerning Internet regulation, which contains a proposal that service providers could be taxed in order to compensate rightsholders for perceived losses, is under Government review.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.