Because of two movies stored in the cloud, MEGA has been blocked in Italy in its entirety, despite all the other content

Jul 19, 2014 20:31 GMT  ·  By

The Italian judges seem to be in dire need of some sort of course on how the Internet works. After some serious censorship actions taken against torrent sites, the Court of Rome banned Mega, Kim Dotcom’s new project, saying that it helps promote the distribution of pirated movies.

The action came after a small independent movie distributor in Italy, Eyemoon Pictures, complained to the judges that two of its movies, “The Congress” and “Fruitvale Station” were being distributed on the platform before the films even hit cinemas, TorrentFreak reports.

So, basically, because of two movies an whole cloud storage service gets blocked for the entire population of Italy. The ban is, as Mega’s lawyers said, obviously disproportionate. In fact, the movie distributor could have just as well filed a takedown notice and have Mega remove the content itself, without going through the court of law.

While Mega has said that it would appeal the Court of Rome ban, there are still ways for Italians to bypass it themselves, including by using Google DNS or VPN tools.

Another banned site was the Russian-based email service Mail.Ru, which amounts to yet another inexplicable decision.

Going by what Italian judges seem to think should be banned, we might as well throw in every webmail service out there and all cloud storage services just because a handful of users might be using the platforms for something illegal.

Making an entire service take the blame for the actions of some of their users is pointless and abusive, while blocking people access to these services is downright censorship.