Rome court to Yahoo!: you’re responsible for piracy occurring on sites in search results.

The ninth district court of Rome has ruled that Yahoo! may not link to sites hosting pirated versions of an Iranian film, About Elly. The case was initiated by the film’s distributor, PFA, together with Open Gate Italia, a public affairs company.

The judge ruled that Yahoo is liable for contributory infringement, copyright infringement facilitation, if Yahoo! doesn’t remove search results after it has been notified of privacy violations. Each of the major search engines has had processes in place for years which enable copyright holders to notify the engines of infringement. However, in this court ruling, the search engine becomes a party to the infringement apparently from the moment the notification is submitted.

It remains to be seen how this will play out. Yahoo! and Google can easy argue that any system where results were immediately removed based on a user notification would be subject to abuse. It’s easy to imagine competitors submitting false privacy notifications to remove their competition. The question is then if the search engines should also have to under take due diligence to determine the rightful copyright holder for any content on the web, and if so, to what degree of certainty and in what time frame.

See also the report on the court decision which appeared in Italy’s financial publication Il sole 24 ore.

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