by Alessandra Cardone
ROME, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) -- In a case involving a woman who killed herself, an Italian court ruled on Friday that Facebook should have removed videos posted of the woman without waiting for an explicit order from a court to do so.
Tiziana Cantone, 31, took her life in mid-September after engaging in a long legal battle to have explicit sex videos she had made with a partner removed from social media.
The contents, which the woman herself had originally sent to four people, were firstly shared through Whatsapp. Yet, they went viral in the spring of 2015 after being posted on Facebook and other social media platforms without her consent.
The videos triggered a wave of abusive comments and mockery of the woman.
Her attempts to have them removed, both through direct requests to social media, web sites and search engines, and with a legal compliant, were fruitless until just before her death.
In early September, a tribunal ordered the videos to be removed from some, but not all, sites and search engines. But the woman was also ordered to pay over 18,000 euros (about 20,000 U.S. dollars) in legal fees.
On Friday, a civil court in Naples finally upheld an appeal lodged by Cantone's mother, ruling with an urgent ordinance that Facebook should have removed the videos, along with links and information about the victim, at the request of the person involved, "with or without an order from a court or other authority."
The judges in Naples also partially recognized a claim submitted by Facebook Ireland, saying that a hosting provider had no obligation to pre-emptively check contents uploaded by users.
"The ordinance is in line with the European regulation, which is based on two principles," Guido Scorza, a lawyer who specializes in Internet-related legal issues and professor with the Universities of Rome and Bologna, told Xinhua.
"Firstly, hosting providers have no duty to carry out a general check of contents in advance; and secondly, hosting providers can be held responsible only for contents violating the law, for example, in the case of child pornography materials."
The Naples court upheld both principles in Cantone's case, since the videos were uploaded without the woman's consent, according to the expert.
Yet, Scorza explained the ruling did not seem to set an overall principle about hosting providers and search engines' behavior, because it was an urgent ordinance on this specific case, not a court's general judgement issued at the end of a trial.
As such, it might be reviewed, or contradicted, by another or even the same court in a different legal case in the future.
The lawyer further said the woman's dramatic story seemed linked to a possible infringement on her privacy, rather than to a "right to be forgotten" (to have one's personal data erased from the web at the person's request).
"The right to be forgotten is based on the assumption that a content was lawful, and of public interest, at the time of its publication, and then becomes illicit, or irrelevant for the interest of the public, also as a result of the passing of time," Scorza explained.
"In this case, those videos should have not been published on social media all along, because she did not give her consent, according to what she and her family said."
The defense attorney for Cantone's family called the ordinance "balanced."
"The court introduces the principle that a hosting provider must remove illicit contents when they are reported by a user, without waiting for an order from a judge or the Italian privacy watchdog," civil lawyer Andrea Orefice was quoted by Ansa news agency as saying.
Facebook Ireland declared it would accept the ruling, but stressed that "the decision makes it clear hosting providers are not obliged to a proactive monitoring of contents."
Meanwhile, prosecutors in Naples opened two separate probes into the death of the woman.
The first was a defamation case launched against the four people who firstly received, and allegedly shared the videos on the web. It was closed due to lack of elements.
The second investigation was launched against persons unknown for "alleged incitement to commit suicide," and is still ongoing.
