Kim Dotcom’s lawyer comments on MegaVideo ruling in Italy

Kim Dotcom’s lawyer comments on MegaVideo ruling in Italy

There’s been an interesting ruling in Italy in relation to that company’s MegaVideo enterprise. Despite the entire MegaUpload business being shut down by the US authorities in 2012, a copyright case being pursed by Italian TV firm RTI against the company has continued to go through the motions, and has now finally reached a judgement. RTI accused MegaVideo of infringing its copyrights by failing to remove its content after the broadcaster requested a takedown.

The Italian court did consider a possible argument that could be put against RTI’s claim: that the broadcaster simply provided a list of its programmes that were appearing on MegaVideo, rather than specific URLs where its content was being streamed without licence. Most user-upload platforms insist that rights owners must provide specific URLs when requesting that allegedly copyright infringing content be removed.
But the Italian court decided that specific URLs were not required, and information about programme names was sufficient. They also noted that content ripped off RTI channels and then uploaded to sites like MegaVideo usually had the broadcaster’s logo in the corner.

That steps up the obligations of safe harbour dwelling websites, in Italy at least. Which is something Dotcom’s highest profile legal rep, Ira Rothken, criticises about the judgement in an interview with Torrentfreak:

The Rome court apparently ruled on this MegaVideo case in a default context, unknown to us, and the result is unworkable case law on ISP secondary copyright liability … it was not explained why the copyright owners couldn’t provide URLs in the takedown notices and no burden analysis based on competent evidence was done by the court.

The lawyer also adds that the ruling in Rome is not in line with precedent in the US – where the really big MegaUpload case will take place, extradition appeal depending. And he argues that there is a case for saying Italian judges are in conflict with European law too, concluding that “this type of secondary infringement rule, if allowed to stand, arguably violates EU freedom of expression and copyright-related treaties, amongst other things”.