Major steps have been made by the Italian government to make harsh sentences for individuals involved in activities related to TV piracy, including defaulters who either ignore or are incompetent to report these illegal activities.

The two new amendments, recently approved by the Senate, introduce prison sentences of up to one year for those failing to report piracy or related offenses. All this aims to protect copyright and to try to handle the increasingly serious and complex problem in IPTV boxes with illegal content distribution. The government has adopted a ‘zero-tolerance’ attitude towards piracy.

Along with greater penalties for illegal content consumers, the amendments further burden service providers, which include VPN and DNS companies. Such providers will be placed under greater burdens to cooperate with enforcement authorities in stopping dissemination of pirated material.

There is, for example the new ‘failure to report’ offense. From now on a person having come to know about piracy activities will face punishment, even imprisonment, if it does not report this awareness within a proper timeframe to the concerned authorities. This rule applies to VPN and DNS service providers like Google and Cloudflare.

These are part of a broader push to bolster Italy’s anti-piracy law and other rights related to intellectual property.

The Italian Serie A League was among the entities welcoming some of the recent steps taken by Italian authorities to thwart illegal streaming of matches.

CEO Luigi De Siervo said that ” technology is an extremely important ally in fighting piracy” and that punishments must be strengthened against companies that do not take adequate action against it.

Basically, the motivation for this push by the league to fight piracy is the financial loss resulting from illegal streaming leading to a reduction in revenue derived both from the sale of rights to television and from the ticketing of stadiums and, thus, the flow of money towards signing top-tier players.