Slashdot Mirror

An Italian clothing company that uses the name "Steve Jobs" as its brand will be able to continue using the moniker after winning a multi-year legal battle, reports Italian site la Repubblica Napoli. Mac Rumors reports: Brothers Vincenzo and Giacomo Barbato named their clothing brand "Steve Jobs" in 2012 after learning that Apple had not trademarked his name. "We did our market research and we noticed that Apple, one of the best known companies in the world, never thought about registering its founder's brand, so we decided to do it," the two told la Repubblica Napoli. The Barbatos designed a logo that resembles Apple's own, choosing the letter "J" with a bite taken out of the side. Apple, of course, sued the two brothers for using Jobs' name and a logo that mimics the Apple logo. In 2014, the European Union's Intellectual Property Office ruled in favor of the Barbatos and rejected Apple's trademark opposition. While the outcome of the legal battle was decided in 2014, Vincenzo and Giacomo Barbato have been unable to discuss the case until now, as their claim on the brand was not settled until 2017. The two told la Repubblica Napoli that Apple went after the logo, something that may have been a mistake. The Intellectual Property Office decided that the "J" logo that appears bitten was not infringing on Apple's own designs as a letter is not edible and thus the cutout in the letter cannot be perceived as a bite. The report goes on to note that the company plans to produce electronic devices under the Steve Jobs brand.

An anonymous reader writes: As many Slashdot readers speculated, the story about a man deleting his entire company with a line of code was a hoax. Marco Marsala, the owner of a Web hosting company claimed on a forum earlier this week that he deleted all the data on his company's server. Stack Overflow, which runs the forum, says that the post was a hoax, and pointed to an article on an Italian news outlet, which describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" (in Italian) to promote Marsala's company. "It was just a joke," Marsala told the paper.

Jason Koebler writes: Geologists who didn't warn a town about an impending earthquake are not murderers, an Italian appeals court ruled today. A 2012 decision that rocked the scientific world has been overturned, according to Italy's Repubblica newspapers and confirmed by other Italian outlets. In that decision, six prominent geologists and one government worker were convicted of manslaughter for failing to notify the town of L'Aquila of a 2009 earthquake that killed at least 309 people. The scientists were originally sentenced to six years in prison and were to pay more than $10 million in damages.

New submitter tchernobog writes "An Italian team funded by Telethon and S. Raffaele of Milan, was able to cure six kids affected by lethal genetic diseases (in Italian, English video): the Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome and the metachromatic leukodystrophy. This is the culmination of a project lasted 15 years, and which cost more than 30M €; the researchers published some preliminary results last year in Nature, and are waiting for the results on more patients to submit another. The really interesting part is: they used a mix of advanced genetic techniques to achieve this result. Firstly, the DNA of a defective cell is corrected with a gene assembled in the lab. This procedure has been very dangerous for the past 20 years: that it can even be used is a good achievement alone. Secondly, the corrected DNA is propagated in the patient's body using a stripped-down version of HIV, of which less than 10% of its original genome remains. Might the feared HIV in reality prove to be salvation for some?"

orzetto writes "Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that YouTube and similar websites based on user-generated content will be considered TV stations (Google translation of Italian original) in Italian law, and will be subject to the same obligations. Among these, a small tax (500 €), the obligation to publish corrections within 48 hours upon request of people who consider themselves slandered by published content, and the obligation not to broadcast content inappropriate for children in certain time slots. The main change, though, is that YouTube and similar sites will be legally responsible for all published content as long as they have any form (even if automated) of editorial control. The main reason for this is probably that it will force YouTube to assume editorial responsibility for all published content, which facilitates the ongoing € 500M lawsuit of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi against YouTube because of content copyrighted by Berlusconi's TV networks that some users uploaded on YouTube. Berlusconi's Spanish TV station, TeleCinco, was previously defeated in court on the grounds that YouTube is not a content provider."

@10u8 writes "The Vatican Library plans to digtize 80,000 manuscripts and store them in the open data format FITS, originally developed for astronomy and maintained under the IAU. The result is expected to be 40 million pages and 45 petabytes. FITS was chosen because it 'has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.'"

plainwhitetoast recommends an article in La Repubblica.it — in Italian, Google translation here. According to Italian lawyer Andrea Monti, an expert on copyright and Internet law, the new Italian copyright law would authorize users to publish and freely share copyrighted music (p2p included). The new law, already approved by both legislative houses, indeed says that one is allowed to publish freely, through the Internet, free of charge, images and music at low resolution or "degraded," for scientific or educational use, and only when such use is not for profit. As Monti says in the interview, those who wrote it didn't realize that the word "degraded" is technical, with a very precise meaning, which includes MP3s, which are compressed with an algorithm that ensures a quality loss. The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.

orzetto writes "Italian newspaper La Repubblica is reporting that Silvio Berlusconi's company, Mediaset (that owns three of the six main TV stations in Italy), has been tagging employees with Rfid chips since last December (for English version, ask the fish). The chips would allegedly be able to track the movements of any worker, even if Mediaset spokesmen say it's only to automatically open some doors to authorized personnel only and such things. Trade unionists from CGIL have reported the company's behaviour to the authorities, as it would be in violation of the Italian workers' charter (again, fish). This would probably be small news (yet another bad employer) if Silvio Berlusconi were not the Italian Prime Minister, violating the same laws he should enforce."

orzetto writes "Italian newspaper La Repubblica is reporting that Silvio Berlusconi's company, Mediaset (that owns three of the six main TV stations in Italy), has been tagging employees with Rfid chips since last December (for English version, ask the fish). The chips would allegedly be able to track the movements of any worker, even if Mediaset spokesmen say it's only to automatically open some doors to authorized personnel only and such things. Trade unionists from CGIL have reported the company's behaviour to the authorities, as it would be in violation of the Italian workers' charter (again, fish). This would probably be small news (yet another bad employer) if Silvio Berlusconi were not the Italian Prime Minister, violating the same laws he should enforce."

cwernli writes "Project Eden [had to] visually provide a spectacular theater high enough to house the towering trees of the rainforests, wide enough for the sun-baked escarpments of the Mediterranean and, oh yes, become the eighth wonder of the world. Easy!?""