The Public Prosecutor of Rome has unilaterally ordered Italy’s ISPs to censor 46 sites, and it appears the ISPs are complying, even though no complaint had been lodged against the sites, nor had any judge issued any order related to them. This doesn’t bode well for the governance style of the new Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, a young politician who is trying to set himself apart from the autocratic Berlusconi regime, which used tight media control as part of its corrupt governance strategy.
The blocking will be carried out on the orders of the Guardia di Finanza (GdF), a department under Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance tasked with dealing with financial crime, and will cover sites including mondotorrent, dopinatorrent, truepirates, filmxtutti, casacinema, watchfreemovies.ch and universfilms.
Interestingly, Sarzana adds that the case could have a novel twist, in that the police carried out the action on their own initiative.
“At present it seems that the action wasn’t carried out at the request of copyright owners associations,” the lawyer explains.
TF spoke with Enzo Mazzo of music industry group FIMI who confirmed that while there is yet no public announcement on the action, it was indeed carried out by the Fiscal Police from Rome with an order from the Public Prosecutor.
Italian Police Carry Out Largest Ever ‘Pirate’ Domain Crackdown
[Andy/Torrentfreak]
(via Techdirt)
(Image: Thohir-Berlusconi, ora sara’ scontro totale, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from calciostreaming’s photostream/Web 2.0 conference/San Francisco, Nov 2008 – 01, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from yourdon’s photostream)