By judgment No. 7709/19 of 19 March 2019, the First Civil Division of the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) ruled in favour of Yahoo! – assisted by Marco Consonni and Matteo Orsingher of Orsingher Ortu and by Simona Lavagnini of LGV Avvocati – dismissing the appeal brought by a well-known Italian television group seeking a finding that the internet service provider was liable for the unlawful dissemination of copyright-protected content through the “Yahoo! Search” service.
The proceedings (now concluded) concerned the alleged liability of Yahoo!, as operator of the “Yahoo! Search” service, for the presence among the indexed results (generated on the basis of services provided by Microsoft) of links to third-party websites on which material over which the Italian television group held exclusive rights had been uploaded without authorisation.
Upholding the findings of the lower courts, the Supreme Court held that a search engine which merely stores information automatically, as an intermediate and temporary step, in order to make its transmission to users more efficient cannot be held liable for any dissemination of unlawful material, since its role remains passive. Nor would this exemption from liability be excluded by the search engine offering additional services to users (such as embedding and suggest search), since these too are based on the automatic and temporary storage of information and therefore do not indicate that the provider plays an active role.
According to the Supreme Court, the search engine’s neutrality (and therefore its exemption from liability) could be excluded only if it failed to act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the unlawful content once served with an order from a judicial or administrative authority.
