Supreme Court of Cassation: pirated streaming and encrypted content; even the savings on a subscription may constitute receiving stolen goods.

The unauthorised use of encrypted television content may constitute the offence of handling stolen goods when the user pays an unauthorised party to gain unlawful access to programmes.

This is the conclusion of Judgment No. 20689/2026 of the Criminal Cassation Division, which upheld the conviction of a defendant for the offence of handling stolen goods under Article 648 of the Italian Criminal Code. In the case in question, the user had made several monthly payments to a party who enabled them to watch encrypted television programmes without authorisation from the broadcasters holding the rights.

The defence had contested, amongst other things, the lack of conclusive evidence of the predicate offence and the absence of any criminally relevant profit. However, the Court of Cassation reaffirmed a well-established principle: for the offence of receiving stolen goods to be established, it is not necessary for the predicate offence to have been established by a final judgment, nor for the perpetrators to have been precisely identified. It is sufficient that the criminal origin be inferred from logical and consistent evidence.

In this specific case, the Court considered it significant that the individual providing access to the content was not authorised to sell subscriptions on behalf of the broadcasters. From this fact, the Court inferred the existence of prior unlawful conduct, attributable to audiovisual piracy or, in any event, to the infringement of rights relating to the broadcast content.

The passage concerning profit is also particularly significant. According to the Court of Cassation, the benefit required for the offence of handling stolen goods need not necessarily consist of a direct gain, but may also take the form of a saving in expenditure. In the present case, the profit was identified as the difference between what the user would have had to pay for a legal subscription and what they had actually paid to the unauthorised provider.

The decision is significant because it confirms that the offence of receiving stolen goods also applies to cases of audiovisual piracy not linked to the circulation of physical goods, but to the unlawful use of digital services and content: those who use unauthorised channels to access protected content are not merely breaching contractual or market rules, but may face criminal liability when they knowingly benefit from an unlawful system.