Italy Implements EU Copyright Directive

Rozzo writes "On 29 April 2003 in Italy will be effective a new law modeled from DMCA, called EUCD, under European Community directives, which seems a very bad thing :-( Italy will tax also every music or video recording support (cdr, dvdr, videotapes...) often doubling it's actual street price. it's a tribute of 0.33$ for each hour of music recordable on a cdr, 1$ every 4.7Gb on recordable dvd... TV, radios and medias quite didn't mention this new law to the public ... fearing a mass disapproval as happened in Finland. Read more about it (in English) here. You can check the status of the EUCD threatening law. Starting 29 April 2003 that new law and tributes will be applied, and the masses will know about it and (perhaps...;-) react. Here's an Open Letter to the Italian 'culture commission'."

Comments

yay

[fredrikj]

Italy will tax also every music or video recording support (cdr, dvdr, videotapes...) often doubling it's actual street price. it's a tribute of 0.33$ for each hour of music recordable on a cdr, 1$ every 4.7Gb on recordable dvd...

And despite consumers having paid extra money for the stuff, "unauthorized" copying will be as illegal as ever, in fact yet easier to pursue thanks to the EUCD, and made impossible in many cases due to technology restrictions. Sigh.

What, 99, or 100%?

[twilight30]

I'm afraid you miss the point.
Berlusconi owns the three major private networks here. As Prime Minister, he also controls the three public national networks.

While this might seem like a loss of consumer rights, in actual fact things are a bit more nuanced than that. Italy has since 1992 attempted to bring its policies more in line with those of other EU nations, basically because those other countries have for several decades looked askance at its high debt, rampant corruption, and woefully inefficient bureaucracy.

This is not to say that I like the idea, I don't. But the fact remains that Italy does these things not to gouge the customer so much as to slowly make the country a bit less wasteful and less beyond the rule of law. It's tortuously snail-like, mostly window-dressing, and frustrating, but you have to start somewhere. Nevertheless, the fact that it's Berlusconi, world-class fraud, behind this latest move, does not make it any less necessary.

Moreover, 'mass disapproval' is massively overstating things (forgive the pun). Highspeed Internet in my area is practically non-existent. The nearest library is over fifteen kilometres from here. Unlike most other parts of Europe, the South of Italy is patchy as to consumerist development. On the other hand, where I am, you can get first-run movies on DVD, usually within a day of official release. Pirated, of course, but no less quality. Everybody does it. I've only met one person in the last year who actually bought a CD at a store (not including me, that is, and that was on a trip to Milan), everything else music-wise is pirated. Hell, I was offered Visual Studio Enterprise (version 6, but still) for *5 Euro* not too long ago. At Christmas I was offered a copy of Oracle.

This price increase will crimp budgets. Marginally. It will not stop piracy. At all.