This from foxbusiness.com, originally published May 11, by Dow Jones Newswires:
ROME – Italy’s highest appeals court, the Cassazione, ruled online blogs don’t constitute a “clandestine” press and aren’t outlawed under a 1948 law, Corriere Della Sera reports Friday on its website.
The ruling means blogs don’t need to be registered as newspapers and don’t have to conform to the press law, including an obligation to run corrections.
It concludes a legal question begun in 2004 when Carlo Ruta was accused of defamation for publishing documents about the 40-year-old murder of a journalist. He was found guilty of both defamation and operating a clandestine press in 2008. It meant he had to close his blog.
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Those of you with an arithmetical bent will notice that the accusation occurred four years before the verdict, and eight years before the overturn of that verdict. Obviously Italian jurisprudence operates in base four. In any event, with all the mistakes that crop up in this blog, I am hugely relieved that it is not ‘clandestine’ and that corrections do not need be published. And I’m not an outlaw. Phew.
An Ex-Expatriate 
My guess is the legal process is slow everywhere… I’m delighted you can continue to blog without fear of legal repercussions!
We have a friend who pursued a law suit here when she bought a business that the seller didn’t actually own (oops!); she thought it would be nice to get her money back since she couldn’t have the business. The process took 18 years (then she got some, but not all, of her money back). However, there are rules for criminal proceedings here, as in the U.S., and they most be prosecuted correctly and in a timely manner.
well, when we read of people that stay decades in death row in the us, we understand legal process can be slow also in America!
A good decision.
for both of us!