According to local media (Google Translate), Italian authorities have fined the operator of file-sharing site ItalianShare.net with a record penalty: €6.4 million ($8.5 million). It's the largest such figure in the nation's history according to the Italian Music Industry Federation.

The fine is being imposed by the Salermo provincial judicial authority, acting as a result of a case brought by the national Finance Guard’s local office in Agropoli near Naples in southern Italy. The Finance Guard is the Italian agency tasked with cybercrime, financial crime, smuggling, intellectual property infringement, and guarding the national borders, among other duties.

ItalianShare was the largest of a handful of sites under the same network, which boasted more than 300,000 users and more than 30,000 links to unauthorized copyrighted material on BitTorrent, cyberlockers, and eDonkey.

The defendant has only been named publicly under his initials, “PG,” but is better-known under the alias Tex Willer. (The defendant took the name of a popular Italian comic book character from the late 1940s.) In July 2012, PG was arrested (Google Translate) by Italian authorities on charges of copyright violations, tax fraud, personal fraud and more.

Italian authorities said PG made an estimated €580,000 ($775,000) through advertising and donations to his site and by selling his users’ data to advertisers.

“The Italian copyright law provides for additional administrative fines based on the number of works illegally distributed,” Enzo Mazza, FIMI’s president, told TorrentFreak. “Due to the enormous amount of products the fine became so huge.”

Mazza added that if PG does not pay, “He will be prosecuted by the tax authority.”

In November 2011, the Italian tech news site PuntoInformatico, published a letter (Google Translate) from PG in which he outlined his viewpoint on file sharing.

PG espouses a viewpoint similarly argued by the likes of The Pirate Bay founders and Megaupload creator Kim Dotcom. In PG's mind, his sites themselves are not directly infringing copyright; they merely offer links to BitTorrent, eDonkey, and other file formats. “Please explain exactly where is the difference between sites like Google [and ItalianShare],” he wrote.