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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.
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 ----
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.
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.
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