Share This Article
The case related to a Facebook page against illegal billboards where users encouraged to take action against them. Because of such comments, a number of vandalism activities had taken place in Rome where over a hundred billboards had been spray blinded and such actions had given rise to a criminal claim against the manager of the Facebook page.
As occurred in the previous case, the defendant had tried to allege that he had no control over the messages published but the court held that given the contents of the message he could not have ignored their criminal relevance and therefore should have taken action against them.
It is interesting to see that both decisions do not mention the non-monitoring and liability exemption for hosting providers principles set forth in the EU E-Commerce Directive. Indeed, based on the principles of the E-Commerce Directive as implemented in Italy, hosting providers which might include both blogger and Facebook page managers hosting comments from users are not liable of the contents published by their users and are not obliged to remove them unless they receive a court order.
These recent decisions create a situation of uncertainty that hopefully higher courts will terminate, but in the meantime if you want to discuss the above feel free to contact me, Giulio Coraggio, also follow me on Twitter and become one of my friends on LinkedIn.
