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Italian Parliament To Mistakenly Legalize MP3 P2P
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.
Are you reading this?
Living With a Nerd
Pirate Bay is rumored to move its operations to Italy.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Perhaps it wasn't a mistake and was intentional.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
IANAL, but just because something has a technical definition doesn't mean it can't a completely different meaning when used in a legal context. Besides, you would still have to argue that listening to the latest Crappy McPop artist is educational or scientific in use.
"for scientific or educational use, and only when such use is not for profit."
And what is educational use? I think there is somewhere a law what tells it is for education when it is used on schools or any other official educational usage. But not on personal usage, what would still be illegal.
If one was to download an mp3, would one need to prove that it is being used for Educational or Scientific use?
Force degrading the music beyond the mp3 compression issue! I've been waiting for the day I can listen to current-day music with pops and scratches just like my old vinyl collection! I just can't get audacity to bring out the "spilled coffee on my 7 inch" sound realistically enough. Metallica always sounds better with a little sugar and creamer.
It is a fair point...is it not?
As a pompous audiophile, this does me absolutely no good whatsoever. On the other hand, the crown icon has given me an excellent idea for enhancing the performance of my 24 karat gold speaker cables by encrusting them with gems.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
TFA suggests that the proponents didn't understand "degraded", but actually the lawmakers got it very right.
... "piracy".
This will keep ordinary people happy in Italy and allow the community sharing that comes naturally, while ensuring that the *ACTUAL* music product of the labels (CDs of uncompressed WAV data) are excluded and therefore protected from sharing, or er
Note that music fans will continue to buy the CDs of the favorite bands regardless of file sharing --- that's what fans do. The sharing is really just free promotion.
Of course, the labels will hate it, but then they hate anything other than open access to peoples' wallets.
Not like anyone would change their pirating habits if that law change happened here*.
*Here being where you live.
I thought the RIAA and MPAA were wholly-owned indirect-through-a-dozen-shell-compay subsidiaries of the Mafia. Or did I get that backwards?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If I were an Italian kid I know what my school science project would be. I'd be researching the effects of popularity on the speed of music downloads in certain p2p protocols...
Reading the original article and then the translation, I noticed that the translation unfortunately could not comprehend some of the key terms that make the article more succulent to the reader.
The important caveat is that although the lawyer (Monti) says that this was a mistake, it will not pose too many problems while it gets fixed. He says that while in the mean time, the law be enforced in such a way that only websites that belong to scientific or academic institutions will be allowed to host these mp3s and it will not even cover websites from professors or scientists even if for scientific or teaching purposes. This was said despite the fact that the Italian law allows anyone to make a website that accomplishes the same things (teach or do research or whatever). Monti said that it will be easier to regulate it in this fashion while the bill gets changed.
The previous example cited was kind of butchered from the translation as well. It said that in 2000 another mistake in the use of technical jargon created a law that legalized all pirated satellite TV decoder cards. Although the law was eventually changed, all charges had to be dropped on current pirates of said cards in the mean time.
They expect the same to happen while they fix this new mishap.
Being Italian myself and seeing the current state of the government (what government) I'm not entirely sure that this didn't happen on purpose to allow current charges to be dropped and so on and so forth...Call me paranoid, but if you've lived in Italy as a citizen, then you'll know what I mean.
My two euros.
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
The reporters could have waited just a little longer to make sure the law actually goes into effect that way it would take more effort to repeal it or something of the sort. Oh well.
The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.
...Which will shortly be reversed when higher courts at European level find that such a law in Italy is in conflict with the relevant European directives.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but this will last about as long as the shenanigans in France a few years ago.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Please reply with hosting services located in Italy. Sure would be nice to set up my new scientific and educational virtual server.
... so we'll just spread the word as far and wide as possible before it's done. Surely nobody in Italy reads Slashdot (or the news), so they'll never clue in and act to prevent this...
That would have required that the law exactly defined the meaning "a bassa risoluzione o degradate" (it:low resolution or degraded). See for example how copyright law functions in most countries (except in country that killed their Fair Use like the US) : "fair use" allows you to ignore the interdiction to copy, and then the law usually explain with great details what constitutes faire use and what not (backup, format-shift, quotes/citations, etc...)
It's not the case with the Italian law, it just says "low res or degraded". So normally one would expect to reasonably interpret the law. Now most of the data you find on P2P networks are recompressed, using lossy algorithm. You can mathematically prove in an indisputable way that this step degrades the data by introducing artefacts and approximations (the strategy by which lossy algorithms actually manage to compress data). You can also show that a lot of movie may have a lower resolution (16:9 widescreen 720x576 to square pixel 640x360 is a common conversion, lower PDA- and handheld-console compatible resolution are also found).
Thus how the law will be interpreted is : "lossy MP3, OGG/Vorbis and X264 repacks non-for-profit are OK ; WAVs, FLACs, straigh-ripped 8GB ISO or for profit are NOT".
If the local antenna of MPAA is unhappy, this interpretation will have to be challenged in court and set a precedent. But as I said before, the degradation induced by repacking using lossy compression is mathematically provable and the corporation will have a hard time trying to prove that exchanging MP3 on a P2P network infringes on this law.
Corporation will probably settle for the more easy route exploiting "The Pirate Bay" hole, trying to prove that during the operation some profit was made and thus the sharer are infringing on the "not for profit" part of the law.
Or will push around to force distributors to use copyrighted media into already already converted into lossy format (selling DRMed lossy music files instead of CDs, or moving the DVB-T transmission to MPEG-4/H263 and AVC/H264 so people won't need to recompress from MPEG2), so that either the p2p user will exchange the same files as the copyrighted material (and break the law) or that the p2p users will have to further compress the files (introducing additional degradation and lowering the quality to the point that legally authorised p2p won't be interesting).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
.... is indistinguishable from a Feature!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
... to convince a judge that you put your mp3 collection up for educational or scientific purposes?
For some reason most people seem to be missing this little tidbit when reading even the summary.
In related news, last decade the US Congress mistakenly passed the DMCA.
In other related news, Springfield's paper is reporting (DOH!) that "Two men were caught Wednesday night with hundreds of DVDs and compact discs, packaged for illegal resale, inside their car... A police report indicated one of the men was arrested; however, a check of jail records showed he was not booked in."
Good thing those guys were just selling 500 bootleg DVDs and 500 bootleg CDs. If they'd ripped them to (degraded) MP3 and posted them for free on the internet, lets do the math here at $100,000.00 per track...
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
What you're thinking of is the Music And Film Industry Association, the international division of the Music And Film Industry Association of America.
The law wouldn't be effective until ministry's decree... the lawyer says that the only hope for politicians to correct the mistake would be to slow down the decree's process and meanwhile hurry up to amend the law (but italian parliament is currently in turmoil for government's crisis), FIMI guys (Federation of the Italian Music Industry) say they are unalarmed because the decree would limit "educational and scientific purpose" to those websites that deal officially with didactics, like those of academic institutions and universities.
:)
But the lawyer says such a decree would be impossible to apply because the Italian Constitution authorizes every citizen to make educational and scientifical divulgation.
Who is right?
I hope (and I would bet) the lawyer is... Anyway if all politicians agree that a law must be changed they usually do that, sooner or later, but if they won't be able to correct their mistake in time for the law to become effective, it would be very funny to see the consequences... also if they'll last only until they change the law again...
And as a latin country produces a *lot* of funny and wrong laws :)
Gladly in Brazil there is not this quality restriction, we are free to share (without any money involved) from user to user.
But people selling those can go to jail (even that I bet no one so far ever did).
Quiet you fools! Wait to point this out until AFTER the legislation passes! :-)
Which /. editor approved of this article?
Did that editor realize he was giving some unwanted a hint?
Is it wise to share the information now? ASs the law is not in effect, it still can be stopped.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You are thinking it's degraded from 44khz WAV files, and that's true. However since MP3s are actually being sold now through online music stores, you would have to argue that these are degraded compared to the actual product being sold. Look at your DVD analogy. You say you couldn't upload an 8gb ISO of a DVD, but isn't that 'degraded' from the original masters or even the HD-DVD version? Certainly if you bought a 256kbit MP3 from Amazon and shared it you wouldn't consider that 'degraded' since it is exactly what you purchased, right?
Bootleg recording collectors will remember that Italy was the source of many "Recordings of Indeterminate Origin". IIRC the law was that the bootleg producer would open up a bank account and deposit a small royalty for each copy produced. The money was made available to the artist to claim (thus legitimizing the bootleg).
use of the 'degraded' works aside, how do you define 'not for profit' when administrators of charity organizations drive around in cars worth more than my annual salary? You could say the pirate bay is not for profit, the money generated by adds is used to pay themselves for thier time, bandwidth, costs, etc, but so long as they don't go public, and are willing to do a little creative accounting...
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Your not allowed anything that can be smoked and is lit.
by not defining smoked or lit this law bans things like cheese and fish in a shop that has lights since they can be smoked and are lit.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
What is the tradition in Italian law for terms such as this? Is the technical definition used, or is it customary to accept the layperson definition? Chalk me up to the group that can't tell any appreciable difference between a decent bitrate MP3 and a lossless format.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Unless their legal system works differently from ours, new laws are generally not retroactive, so pending cases would be bound by whatever law was in effect at the time the offense was committed. Of course, IANAL.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
or was it?
Since images are allowed too, would it include video too? So the law would quite much allow music and movies too. Now just add it to games aswell!
Interesting, so on the tails of 15 years of technically ignorant Internet legislation having unintended consequences prohibiting various legitimate behavior, there is one law that might pass in one country on the face of the Earth where they might accidentally reduce the scope of executive power in a technical field depending on the court's interpretation of "degraded". Fascinating.
I think it serves best as the exception that proves the rule; ignorance in the legislative, executive, and judicial processes tends to lead to oligarchy designed by moneyed (or otherwise potent) special interests.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
On the other hand, when some user converts the CD tracks into MP3 and puts them on P2P, and the MP3 found on webstores aren't the same product. At all.
That would be claiming copyright infringement on some picture you took with your camera of some public monument - on the ground that an artist is selling a poster of the same monument and your photograph infringes the artist's copyright because they both depict the same monument. It doesn't work this way.
What is important is not what the piece of work represents. What is important is what you duplicated. Which was the "source" of your data. The colour of the bits which compose the data file.
Your photograph isn't related to the artist's poster. You took picture of some monument, your photograph is related to it and as the monument is public, you can take pictures of it.
To go back to MP3 : you took a CD, you ripped it and compressed it to MP3. Those MP3s are descendant of the CD - the CD was the source of data of which you made a copy. The MP3s aren't bit for bit identical to the original material that you duplicated. They are degraded. You're safe.
The fact that some MP3 exists on some on-line store have nothing to do with the copyright law. The copyright law is only about duplicating content and at no point in time in this exemple the online store did come into play. The duplicated thing was a CD, copyright law concerns it.
Again, doesn't matter. You are *NOT* making a copy of the master or the HD-DVD. the bit that you convert aren't colored from those.
What you make a copy of is your DVD.
When proprely done, a 8GB ISO of ripped DVD is supposed to be bit-for-bit equivalent (at least regarding the multimedia content that is protect by copyright law - the file header and other metadata might change, but the data that will ultimately be sent to the screen is kept un-changed).
As opposed, for example, to shrinking (using K9Copy or something similar) the movie to fit a 4GB disc (in that case, the quality was decreased to fit in a tighter place).
Or for example, recompressing it using X264 - the conversion is lossy and it mathematically provable that degradation has resulted.
The fact that the 8GB iso is degraded when compared to some master copy at the studio that you don't have access to doesn't count. What count is the source that was used in the process of copying.
Exact copy is "no no!", degraded using lossy process is tolerated.
Exactly, in that case it won't be considered 'degraded' because what you are making and distributing copies of it the exact data as you received it (no matter what exists on some other CD that wasn't involved in the current copying).
:
That's what I meant in the end of my previous posting
- If companies continue to distribute music in CDs and movies as DVDs (or not-much compressed MPEG2 streams on digital boardcast networks), people have an incentive to make degraded copies using lossy compressors (to make data use less space). And those copies could be tolerated on P2P network under Italian law (as long as done not-for-profit).
- If companies switches their distribution channels to MP3s and more compressed digital broadcast (H264), the situation change.
There's no incentive for people to re-compress the media : what they got is already compressed.
But they don't have the right to distribute these files under any copyright law (except so
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
But we all know it's a fruit. Why? Because then they can count ketchup towards federal dietary standards.
I'd like to see the complete text, especially as related to "degraded". Maybe the MP3 just has to be tied up, and have naked pictures taken of it?
*baddum bump*
Seriously folks, I'm curious about technicalities of the wording. For example, I can see how one creating an MP3 from a CD track is creating a degraded copy, but what if Joe got the MP3 from some other source? He would not be allowed to copy that MP3 and publish it, because it will be of the SAME quality as the original he got. In fact, even if you create an MP3 from a CD track, technically, uploading it somewhere is creating a copy of the same quality. So it would seem maybe the law only protects fair use at home. (But mention of publishing and internet confuse that whole angle).
Hmmm.....so that's why one sees so many Italian flags next to users in eMule.
Italian legislators screw things so much that sometimes, by pure chance, they actually develop some good laws!
Ciao!
SeqBox
This would be fantastic news if I were still downloading MP3's on a dialup connection. Nowadays the Internet is faster, hard drives are bigger, and I want FLAC. I don't think this law is going to help FLAC users.
The way I figure it, you have two sites. OinkA and OinkB. OinkA has the even bits, a UUID and the sha1sums, OinkB has the odd bits, a matching UUID and thesha1sums. Someone writes a very simple merge script.
i can has a loophole?
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
the curve ball, yes you can share, but only for scientific or educational purposes. While you sit in the courtroom, YOU have to prove that your open P2P connection was for 'educational' purposes. Good Luck.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Bravo!
Either last year or the year before, Italian Parliment passed a law which banned all electronic games. Their intent was to stop online gambling... but their effect was to outlaw Minesweeper, Pac-Man, every cell phone which shipped with a game on it, etc.
Yes, they certainly give a lot of deep thought to the results of their laws. Almost as much as US conservatives!
I can see a court striking this down real quickly - it was obviously not the legislative intent for the word "degrade" to be used in this most technical sense. Italy, being a Civilian country, likely has on the books an article which states, "All words and phrases will be subject to their most common meaning and interpretation if such interpretation does not lead to absurd consequences."
I'm sorry, its just the future lawyer in me.