President Zorzoni: «We ask politics to exclude the legal liability of service providers in the event that they find themselves slavishly executing the Authority’s order»
“AIIP has always been on the side of copyright protection, however this provision brings with it a series of significant critical issues”: so theItalian Association of Internet Providers he comments on the recent approval by the Chamber of Deputies of the proposed law against online piracy and to protect cinematographic and audiovisual contents, series and television programmes, live broadcasts of shows and sporting events.
A measure voted in the first reading extremely quickly but which has aroused many perplexities among operators in the sector.
«Already in February we had the opportunity to send our concerns to the VII and IX Joint Commissions through a very detailed memorandum – explains the President of AIIP, Giovanni Zorzoni. – The creation of a homogeneous infrastructure based on a synchronous filtering system, capable of interfacing simultaneously with the operators offering access to the Internet, with the CDNs and with the Cloud operators, constitutes a single susceptible “point of failure” to undermine the security and resilience of national networks”.
The provision, according to AIIP, achieves the objective of creating a “mega-firewall” managed by AGCOM as regards the contents, effectively giving it the legal means necessary to oblige the service operators to implement it. However, it does not consider that this tool will be easily bypassable through already widespread tools such as VPNs, and will involve significant costs.
Precisely with respect to costs, the association highlights the unreasonableness of downloading them to access operators, third parties without any responsibility for the offences, and therefore indirectly to Italian users, rather than to the subjects who will directly benefit from the new tool, ie the rights holders.
«We have asked the policy to add an article to the text of the provision which excludes the legal liability of service providers in the event that they are slavishly executing the order of the Authority – adds Zorzoni. – IImagine, for example, that while executing the filtering operation, the operator blocks IP addresses that carry not only illegal traffic but also legal traffic; or that what had been indicated as illegal in reality is not; here, in all these cases, it could be the service operators who get involved, for which we ask for the necessary protections».
In anticipation of the next examination in the Senate, AIIP requests a reassessment and an adequate balance between the need, on the one hand, to protect intellectual property and, on the other, to not compromise the roles and functioning of the Internet ecosystem. In the meantime, he expressed his satisfaction with the presentation, signed by Deputies Davide Faraone and Giulia Pastorella, of Agenda 9/00217-A/002, which – acknowledging a specific request made by AIIP in its brief to the Commissions – bears the Government commitment to evaluate the preparation of a whitelist of IP addresses and rootname servers that cannot be targeted by filtering measures, in order to minimize the risk of erroneously disabling critical systems, and hopes that the Government will fully implement the approved commitment .