Italian courts hammer Agenzia del Territorio (Land Registry)

Rulings in favour of the PSI Directive

The Hague: 24 July 2009

Three Italian Appeal courts have made it crystal clear that the current exploitation practice of the Italian Land Registry Agency (Agenzia del Territorio) is contrary to European law. The practices of the Italian Land Registry Agency relied on the Italian Law 311/2004, which interestingly was adopted just shortly after the European PSI Re-use Directive. Law 311/2004 explicitly encouraged the Agency to become a market operator by selling its PSI (cadastral data) directly to the final customers (such as banks), rather than to re-users for adding value to the data (like the plaintiffs in these legal cases did). Re-users took the Agency to court over these practices.

The Italian court decisions and rulings by the Italian Anti Trust Authority offer insight into the practical application of the PSI Directive, in particular related to specific sectoral re-use regimes and the Directive, the synergy between general competition rules and the Directive and the burden of proof with respect to excessive pricing.

Briefly stated, the Italian courts found the following.

• The clause imposing a fee to be paid to the Agency every time the PSI (data) was exploited by the re-users was contrary to the principles of the PSI Directive 2003/98/EC.
• Given that the provisions of the Directive were clear and the Italian law had not implemented them correctly, the provisions of the Directive were self-enforceable.
• Competition law was applicable to the Agency in spite of the fact that it was a public institution, which carried out both public tasks and an economic activity on the market with the latter being subject to the competition rules.
• The Agency had abused its dominant position as it enjoyed a monopoly over the supply of the data while imposing conditions for re-users to conclude only long term agreements thus restricting their ability to get to the PSI (data).
• Conditions limiting the re-use potential of PSI without any justification are contrary to the spirit of the PSI Directive.
• The increase of fees that the Agency had applied could not be considered as too burdensome, as the appellants had not explained why such increase was excessive (which seems to be contrary to article 7 of the Directive).

Read More Cases Information (Summaries on Italian court cases on PSI re-use; European Commission Infringement against Italy for incorrect transposition of the PSI Directive; and Italian Anti Trust Authority reports)

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