Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Er, wasn't oink's claim to fame that it served up non-degraded music, ie. the best quality possible?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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...
"spilled coffee on my 7 inch"
I hear you can sue McDonalds for a lot of $$$ if you do that!
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
According to the interviewed lawyer this law, written as it is, would for example permit to make a websites that publishes the entire discography of an author for review and comment purpose, or to make a p2p public network of public academies that bring music available to students for study purpose. And so on (use your imagination). :)
I hope he's right!
It was indeed...release a 320 bit rate MP3, and it still would technically be considered degraded...not to mention it would be more or less indistinguishable between it a loseless file...unless you are a stuck up audiophile that also believes a multi-thousand dollar cable makes a difference)
Living With a Nerd
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.
This is an announcement: A long offtopic flamewar about how vinyl is (or isn't) so much better than any form of digital reproduction will be along momentarily. We now return to your scheduled programming.
At the bottom of the
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 ]
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.
No audiophile needed, nor any rediculously priced cables.
I've made mix CDs for my car. Some of the tunes are 320 bit rate MP3s my daughter got somewhere (don't ask, don't tell) and some are straight bit for bit copies from the CD. It's a good six speaker system, but far from audiophile. And at 55 years old I hardly have "golden ears". But I can hear the difference between the MP3s and the straight CD rips.
Now with your typical two little speakers and a "subwoofer" (we used to have bigger woofers, in fact my old non-audiophile JBLs have bigger woofers than what they now call "subs") you kids are using now, you may well not hear the difference.
If you have a good car stereo, try this: Take your best factory CD and rip every other song to wav and every other song to MP3. Then burn a copy from those rips. You'll hear what I mean, especially since your ears are probably a lot better than mine.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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?
I already have CDs like that. And oddly (ok not that odd), the MP3s actually make the pops louder.
If you isten to the KISS vinyl album with the song "Mister Speed" on it (the album cover just says "kiss") you can hear bleedthrough on the master tape on one tune, and if you listen to the first Aerosmith album on vinyl you can hear tape hiss. Pink Floyd fired their first label for that kind of crap!
But if you make a CD of Led Zeppelin's "Presence" or Boston's first vinyl albums with a good enough turntable, your home made CD will have more dynamic range and better frequency response than the store-bought CD.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I've always wondered: Why dont they just play a record and record that on to a CD? :)
You then get the Vinyl sound from a CD.
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).
That is just silly.
The only reason some people prefer vinyl over CD is that in many cases vinyl recordings are mastered differently - more dynamics etc, since mostly audiophiles buy them. There is no way that anyone can hear any improvement in actual recording quality in vinyl compared to a CD recording (16 bits per sample, 44100 samples per second). Just because vinyl isn't as easily quantised as digital data doesn't mean that it has infinite resolution.
Burning an mp3 to a cd does no further conversion.
Whether i read an mp3 from my ipod, my cd player or from a hard drive it's the same mp3, the only difference will be the decoder used.
I understand the differences completely.
It is however possible to capture the 'warmer' sound on CD.
Its got nothing to do with data rates.
Its the physical medium and the processing it goes through.
You can settle this once and for all. Smart guy like you, I'm sure you have a bitching sound card and A-D converter (if not, find someone with a Lunatec V3 you can borrow). Get your turntable and your best-sounding record and record it in 24/192 (at which setting even audiophiles can't claim to hear the difference), then downsample, upsample back to 24/192, put them both in audacity, reverse the phase of one, and whatever results is the difference between them. If it's a significant amount of data (personally, I'd be surprised if it were audible), then congratulations! You win, and you can show any doubters exactly what sound is in the "warmth" that CDs can't produce.
ResidntGeek
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 ]
No, you can't because all the technical reasons for why one is better or both are equal is a smoke screen. The real arguments can be boiled down to this:
Simply put, there is nothing that one side could say that would convince the other they are right because it has nothing to do with the tech and everything to do with the vinyl guys thinking the digitals are deaf, and the digitals thinking the vinyls are loons.
IANAL but AFAIK here in Italy, if with a new law something BECOMES illegal, then that law can't be retroactive and you can't be judged for what you did BEFORE the law came out.
But if with a new law something that was illegal becomes legal, then in pending judicial cases defendants are acquitted because "the fact isn't offence anymore".
This is something that can, and has, been empirically tested.
If you do a double blind test with the direct signal from the turntable compared to the same through 16bit 44.1KHz digital ad/da conversion, people cannot tell the difference. In any properly set up and level matched trial. Ever.
The problem is that the vinyl believers cannot accept this, and either will not try it, or do not have the facilities to do a proper test themselves.
it has nothing to do with the tech and everything to do with the vinyl guys thinking the digitals are deaf, and the digitals thinking the vinyls are loons.
It isn't just that the $50,000 tube amp buying $1000 knob (to make the music "warmer") buying nuts think that digitals are deaf, but that the audiofools, I mean audiophiles refuse any tests. They won't compare the best of digital to the best of whatever they like. Double blind studies with good equipment on both sides *always* finds no difference. The audiofools claim that the equipment wasn't good enough so the results are bad, yet refuse to stage the test themselves. Audiofools formed a religion, not a science of better sound. They aren't interested in what's correct, but finding some exisential "truth" that doesn't exist. I have no doubt that the sound from my $50 soundblaster speakers hooked up to my computer is inferior to $20,000 speakers. But how many (if any) can tell the difference between $500 and $5000 speakers? Or $5000 and $20,000 speakers?
So, using science can't convince the Pope that God doesn't exist, nor can proving scientific equivelence between two ways of storing music convince an audiofool that there isn't a difference.
Learn to love Alaska
32bit resolution is only useful if you are listening in a vacuum.
16bit is better than human hearing can resolve. 24bit is enough so that the Brownian motion of air molecules randomly hitting your ear drums becomes higher than the noise floor of the recording. Though admittedly, your heartbeat, the sound of the blood flowing round your body and the background hiss of your nervous system means you will never hear them.
Go in an anechoic chamber one day and you will be surprised how noisy your ears are.
Not that any real 24bit converters actually exist. Perhaps some of the cryogenic cooled ones can do 22 bits on a good day. (Real 22bit, not "Z-Weighted, perceptually adjusted to make the product sheet look good" bits)
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.