The 29th of November, the Milan court GIP (pre-trial examining judge), validated the sequestration of the website avaxhome.ws, ordered by the Public Prosecutor following a lawsuit filed by Mondadori.
The acknowledged offences are copyright infringement and fencing, since on the portal important newspapers were made available in .pdf format. It doesn’t look like the site actually hosts such content, rather it provides users the possibility to suggest links that other users can use to retrieve copies of said content.
The Court couldn’t do much as the site was hosted in servers located in the Russian Federation, but it intervened on the italian providers, ordering them to deny access to the site through filters or better, by blocking the portal IP address.
Something similar happened already to The Pirate Bay, which nowadays is hard to reach following a Court order. Basically these websites stay open and can be accessed from abroad, but not from within Italy. Megaupload’s case had a different result, since the FBI managed to have it closed, making it impossible to access it.