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Italy’s Uffizi Gallery wins US court battle against ‘bloodsucking’ ticket touts

The world-famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence is celebrating after a US court barred online ticket touts from using the Italian museum's name.

Published: 7 February 2020 10:12 CET
Italy's Uffizi Gallery wins US court battle against 'bloodsucking' ticket touts
Florence's Uffizi Gallery (Galleria degli Uffizi) is one of Italy's most important, and most-visited, museums. Photo: AFP

The Arizona court ruled on Thusday against third parties using several addresses including Uffizi.com and Uffizi.net, the museum said, hailing the “historic” ruling.

Visitors to historic museums and sites around the world are frequently confronted with a plethora of websites masquerading as official sites when seeking to buy tickets online.

“These websites have been exploited to date for the sale of tickets to the museum at grossly inflated prices through improper use of the name Uffizi in a deliberate attempt to trick visitors,” the gallery said in a statement.

Visitors queue to get into the Uffizi Gallery (Galleria degli Uffizi) in Florence. Photo: AFP

“This was no mere small-time legal tussle: huge sums of money are involved in the phenomenon of online ticket touting, and it is money stolen from the community as a whole that ends up lining the pockets of the web's artful dodgers.”

The legal battle was with BoxNic Anstalt, a company that had registered numerous domains containing the word Uffizi in Arizona, said the museum, one of the most visited in the world.

The Arizona Federal Court has now declared the “museum's superior right” over that company to use the Uffizi name, brand and logo.

BoxNic had argued that the term “uffizi” was simply an old-fashioned spelling of the Italian word “uffici” or “offices”

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The court “has obliged the company to transfer the registration of the domains it had misappropriated to the Uffizi within 15 days,” the gallery said.

“We have delivered a devastating blow to the web's bloodsuckers who have been exploiting our heritage illegally and in bad faith for years like parasites, depriving the community of resources,” said gallery director Eike Schmidt.

“The Arizona court's ruling sets an extremely important international precedent,” the museum said.

The director of Florence's Uffizi Gallery museum, German Eike Schmidt. Photo: AFP

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CRIME

Italian court cuts sentences of Americans convicted of killing police officer

An Italian appeal court on Wednesday reduced the decades-long sentences of two American men convicted of killing a police officer in Rome while on a teenage summer holiday in 2019.

Published: 4 July 2024 08:41 CEST
Italian court cuts sentences of Americans convicted of killing police officer

Following a retrial ordered by Italy’s highest court that began in March, the Rome appeal court resentenced Finnegan Elder and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth to 15 years and 11 years in prison respectively.

Elder and Natale-Hjorth, from San Francisco, aged 19 and 18 at the time of the killing, were sentenced to life in prison in May 2021 for stabbing policeman Mario Cerciello to death during a late-night encounter.

An appeal court the following year reduced the sentence to 24 years for Elder, who wielded the knife, and 22 years for Natale-Hjorth, who did not handle the weapon but helped hide it.

But Italy’s highest court in March 2023 ordered a retrial to examine potentially mitigating factors, notably that the teenagers said they were unaware that Cerciello and his partner, who were in plain clothes at the time of the attack, were police.

Elder’s lawyers, Renato Borzone and Roberto Capra, said in a statement Wednesday that the court’s decision was “certainly more in line with Finnegan’s actual responsibilities”.

“It is regrettable that we have had to wait through five levels of jurisdiction to see recognised what the young American man has stated since his first interrogation,” they said.

The case horrified Italy and led to an outpouring of public grief for the newlywed Cerciello, who was hailed as a national hero.

But the trial, which revealed multiple examples of police error, offered two very different versions about what happened in the moments just before Elder stabbed Cerciello with an 11-inch (28-centimetre) camping knife on a dark Rome street.

READ ALSO: Italy orders retrial for Americans convicted of killing police officer

While the prosecution’s star witness, Cerciello’s partner Andrea Varriale, testified that the officers were suddenly attacked, the teens said the two men jumped them from behind and did not identify themselves nor show their badges.

The Americans claimed self-defence, saying they thought the men were drug dealers, following their botched attempt to buy drugs earlier in the evening.

Defence lawyers had denounced the life sentences originally given to their clients – Italy’s toughest criminal sentence – saying they were harsher than many given for premeditated killings by the mafia.

The high-profile case also threw a spotlight on police conduct in Italy after Natale-Hjorth was blindfolded while in custody.

The officer who blindfolded him was later handed a two-month suspended sentence.

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