14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Italy took yet another controversial step in its efforts to fight online piracy by blocking access to Mega, a cloud storage business, and Mail.ru, a Russian email service.
The judges in Italy really seem to need a few lessons in how the Internet works, as banning an entire service because someone may or may not have stored an illegal copy of a movie or song is extremely ignorant.
Mail.Ru, which is among the top five domains visited in Russia, also ranks in top 40 of the most accessed domains in the entire world, according to Alexa. Some 27 million users visit the site every day.
Understandably, Mail.Ru isn’t going down quietly. In fact, it has issued a statement this morning, saying that it hasn’t yet been able to figure out why it has been blocked in Italy.
Eyemoon Pictures, a small movie distribution studio, is the one that asked the court to take down the services for several copies of two of its movies. While the Mega case is somewhat clear because someone must have stored the copies in their accounts, it seems rather unlikely that the same thing happened for Mail.ru.
Furthermore, even if that were the case, a simple DMCA takedown notice would have done the job, and both services would have been available for Italian users. However, this didn’t happen. Basically, Eyemoon Pictures didn’t contact Mega or Mail.Ru about the illegal content, either through a notification or a requirement to remove the copies.
The Russian company was just as surprised as everyone else and found out about the whole issue straight from the media.
“We believe that this situation is detrimental to the interests of our users, and clearly illustrates the fact that some national laws in this area don’t consider the specifics of the Internet companies and do not provide a clear, transparent process for resolving such conflicts,” reads Mail.ru’s statement.
The service urges the community to communicate more, to have an active dialogue about the development of international pre-trial procedures in order to resolve disputes between copyright holders and Internet service providers.
Basically, it wants things to be fixed so this doesn’t happen to others as well, although chances are that the situation is going to repeat itself, especially in Italy where judges seem adamant to do whatever Hollywood, the music industry and their local associates ask them to do.
Mail.Ru is working to fix the situation, but it hasn’t managed to do much over the weekend because the Italian authorities wouldn’t respond.