The Public Prosecutor of Rome, Italy has ordered the blocking of 27 BitTorrent, cyberlocker and other file-sharing sites such as Rapidgator, Uploaded, BitShare, NowVideo, VideoPremium, as it aims to battle piracy.

“The domains of sites linking to torrent files, in order to download illegal copies of music and movies, have been seized [blocked] this week as ordered by Preliminary investigation of the Judge of Rome, at the request of the public prosecutor, following an investigation of the Italian Cybercrime Police,” reads a statement obtained by TorrentFreak.

All of the domains are now inaccessible in Italy as they have beend blocked at the ISP level.  The prosecutor leading the war against piracy in Italy declared that he wants the case to progress internationally in pursuit of a “full-blow domain seizure.”

Normally, crackdowns are backed by large Hollywood and music industry groups, but this initiative said to have sprung from “a small Italian distributor for one single cartoon movie.”

Fulvio Sarzana, a lawyer with the Sarzana and Partners law firm specializing in Internet and copyright disputes, is concerned about freedom and the proportion between the seizure of entire sites and domains containing millions of legal files and the potential violation of the copyright of a single movie.

“I think that operations like this one could jeopardize freedom of speech, and endanger legitimate web sites, being also a risk for the civil liberties. Copyright cannot be considered as a more essential right than freedom of expression, or a more important matter than a free and open internet,” Sarzana said.

The seizure of the domains is said to be reminiscent of the 2010 incident when the ICE – US Homeland Security seized 70 domains due to alleged willful copyright infringement.