The Court of Appeal of Rome, with judgment 29 April 2017 has passed a sentence against Break Media, one of the leading American web providers for “culpable cooperation by omission in the illegal distribution of Mediaset TV programs”.
Break Media belongs to Defy Media, a digital media company which boosts approximately 500 million views a month on its channels. In the judgement, the Court ruled that the Internet operators are to be held fully responsible also when contents protected by copyrights are illegally broadcast by third users. The situation was made even worse by the use of ” advanced operational systems” directly aimed at mere” economic gains”, namely profit making.
The Court’s decision adds another element to a case law which is still fragmentary and it follows the ruling of March 2017 issued by the Tribunale di Frosinone, which established that, in the absence of a proven profit aim, internet operators allowing illegal streaming of contents uploaded by third parties shall not be considered automatically guilty of copy right infringement.
The distribution of audio-visual contents via internet is a major issue for distributors, who suffer from a lack of rules. Andrea Occhipinti, founder of Lucky Red, when referring to a EU regulation involving over 400 players of the sector, especially in Italy, France and Spain, affirmed that ” It is useless to impose a single European digital market and then neglect web rights, because this has a damaging effect on European digital market”.
“According to EU regulation” Occhipinti, went on “when a TV buys the distribution rights of a given product and decides to broadcast it also on its site for free, such contents must be open also in the rest of Europe, always for free. This undermines the very foundations of the European audio-visual market, where coproduction’s products are given exclusively to the participating countries and rights are sold afterwards to other countries’ broadcasters. Such regulation has the only effect of favouring multinational groups, especially the American ones”.
