Today in London, at the International lntellectual Property Enforcement Summit, prof. Angelo Cardani, the Chairman of Italian Regulator AGCOM, reported the preliminary results of the Copyright Enforcement Regulation which recently (March 28, 2014) entered into force in Italy. The regulation is quite a unique measure in Europe – since no other telecom regulator is entrusted with copyright enforcement powers in the EU – and has been highly contested by civil society, ISPs and consumers associations, while plauded by the content industry. Experts have released different views on the matter. Likewise, the Regulation encountered different feedback at international level: while an official advisor of the United Nations argued that the measure may be dangerous for freedom of speech, the US administration welcomed the regulation and apparently because of that it dropped Italy down from the black list of “pirate” countries.

Various recourses for the annulment of the regulation are pending with Italian courts and a decision may be adopted quite soon before the end of June. A legal description of the Copyright Enforcement Regulation can be found here.

Prof. Cardani defended the regulation declaring that “no Armageddon happened“. He maintained that the measure was necessary to protect the creative industry because the judiciary remedies are not sufficiently quick. He informed the audience that  41 complaints have been filed so far with regard to photos (15), movies (11), music (7), books (4) and digital newspapers (1), video games (1). The authority started 28 proceedings, two-thirds (13) of these were closed as a result the spontaneous removal of the content. In 8 cases, the Authority adopted sanctions, ordering also the blocking of pirate sites’ DNS addresses. Most serious infringements concerned the illegal downloading of music and movies.

The data released by prof. Cardani have been made public with a PR of AGCOM.

It is still premature to make a complete assessment of such results. Probably, such outcome will be analyzed by AGCOM to eventually refine the Regulation. For instance, it is clear that many claims have been filed with regard to individual, and non massive, infringements (while the Regulation was deemed to deal only or mainly with large-scale and commercial infringements). Most of the requests concern pictures, i.e. a creative works which are not highly discussed  in the piracy debate. The web-blocking measures have been imposed with regard to websites hosted abroad, however is not clear whether substantial attempts have been made in order to ask foreign police to shut down such servers and avoid web-blocking (Prof. Cardani said that international cooperation is still a problem). Web-blocking was ordered at DNS level rather than at IP level, in order to avoid over-blocking.

Remarkably, in the last weeks various ISP were informed by AGCOM about pending proceedings which could result in web-blocking. AGCOM suggested ISPs to impose a block even before a final decision was adopted. Mostly ISPs rejected this approach and experts have argued that such anticipated blocking could be legally risky.