In February 2015, Police raided the residence of the President of the SIAE association Gino Paoli to probe an illicit two millions euro transfer to a Swiss bank in 2009 for tax evasion.

Italian law does not require a deposit since Berne Convention provides that the rights are first acquired upon creation of the work and therefore it is possible to prove the ownership by other means such as Copyzero.

According to Article 180 bis, subscription is mandatory only for cable retransmission (not such a widespread technology in Italy), while broadcasting, both via radio and television, is not included.

Non-EU authors, publishers and dealers are not allowed to become associates and therefore have to give mandate to SIAE in order to get legal protection for their works.

In order to register a song, authors need to fill the work registration form ("modello 112"), also attaching the music score (at least the melody transcription) and lyrics.

These societies collect revenues depending on their fees, detract their commission and hand over the remaining part to SIAE, which in turn distributes it between the rightholders (authors, record producers, performers).

The aim of the group was to allow the authors to choose free and easy-to-use licenses, keeping the commercial use to themselves, and relying on SIAE only for distribution and collection of revenues, but nothing came of it.

This choice depended on the new frontiers of computer science, that allowed the authors to publish their works online, which would have been a sort of theft according to previous rules.

The only solution for those who wanted to distribute their works online for free, was Creative Commons licence that was able to protect them from plagiarism for commercial purposes, thanks to its "non-commercial" clause.

The total amount of revenues collected is estimated by Confindustria and Assinform (Italian Tassociation of information technology) at €300 million per year.

[22] On 27 November 2013, the Italian Minister Massimo Bray (Beni Culturali) supported the decision to establish new taxes, with revenue going to the SIAE, for certain electronic goods, such as HDTVs and PVRs.

[7] On 15 December 2013, it's revealed that the SIAE organization had a hand in writing the new amendment to the law resulting in increased revenues of about €150,000,000 during 2014 from the tax on smart TVs, PVRs, hard disks, blank DVDs, CDs and smartphones (all goods that are sold without media content bundled, so the ratio legis is inconsistent).

In October 2011, the SIAE began requiring a license fee from websites hosting movie trailers,[31][32] which had been considered "fair use" for promotional purposes.

[22] This decision raised many doubts and criticism even by well-known directors and actors[33][34][35][36][37] and caused the withdrawal of the video content on some sites.

The mandatory fee paid to the SIAE, grants permission to musicians, bands and DJs to cover songs or play Italian copyrighted music.