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File Sharing in Italy Not a Crime if Not for Profit

MILAN — Italy's top criminal court has created a bright line by ruling that downloading content and software over the Internet isn’t a crime if profit wasn’t the motivation.

The ruling threw out convictions against two former Turin Polytechnic Institute students who set up a peer-to-peer, file-sharing network that was shut down within months.

One analyst told the Associated Press that violating a copyright, for example by breaking copy-protection technologies in place, remained illegal even if downloading the material had been decriminalized.

"I consider this sentence as a very intermediate step in clarifying what is legal and what is not legal," said analyst Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffe, the president of Assodigitale, a think-tank on digital technology. "This sentence marks an important step in that peer-to-peer per se is not an illegal activity. What stays and remains illegal is copyright infringement by cracking copyright files, and distributing it for commercial purposes."

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