Italian police hunting for P2P users, the real story

June 3, 2003

katastrofe used our news submit to tell us that TheRegister has a follow up on the story we recently reported about. The Italian tech website repubblicca.it reported that the Italian police was prosecuting over 3,000 P2P users for illegal file sharing. The article has since been picked up by all media outlets, including Italian TV and other websites.

According to the article writer of TheRegister even politicians tried to grab the limelight by loudly denouncing this legal monstrosity, forgetting alas that they are the ones who did precious little to stop it before it was approved. But good news, it seems the story is not true. TheRegister did some research and found out the following:

So I phoned Captain Mauro Piccinni, who is in charge of the Milan police branch that launched the alleged raid, and asked for details. It turns out that there is no wide-ranging raid on average Joe Downloaders. His branch is merely prosecuting a group of about 200 Italian Net users who were buying and selling pirate CDs containing copyrighted software, music and movies, which is a crime that carries a prison sentence. Not-for-profit P2P sharing does not.

Piccinni vehemently denied any involvement of ordinary P2P users in his investigation. P2P was mentioned to Repubblica reporters only because the illegal material was originally downloaded from KaZaA and the like by the ringleaders of this petty gang. Moreover, the investigation began last September, before new copyright laws came into force in Italy, so the EUCD has nothing to do with the whole mess. But why let mere facts get in the way of an interesting story?