Slashdot Mirror
Italy May Censor Torrent Sites
An anonymous reader writes "Following a Pirate Bay block more than a year ago, Italy continues its attempts to censor torrent sites. The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that copyright holders can now force ISPs to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are hosted outside Italy. The torrent sites which 'hold' copyrighted materials are accused of taking part in criminal activity. It seems someone should enlighten Italian jurists about technology."
This is extremely worrying.
Let me get this straight. In previous rulings copyright holders were denied the blocking of sites on the grounds of free speech and censorship.
The Supreme court gets involved and blocking P2P sites suddenly becomes a good idea?
We have a Supreme court in the UK and something similar happened recently with "Unfair" bank charges.
Two (maybe one was an appeal?) court cases were held to decide whether bank charges fell under UK consumer law and thus can be challenged that bank charges were excessive. Both times the courts agreed this was the case.
The Supreme court got involved and funnily enough ruled that this was not the case which now means banks can charge what they like.
Since Lord Mandy went on holiday and "bumped into" into Mr Geffen - the recommendations of the digital communications report and the concerns of ISPs were completely ignored. It appears the "3-stikes" legislation is to go ahead after all.
The EU took a dim view of this policy and warned the UK it was illegal and against the EU principles of free speech and human rights.
I'm pretty sure the EU slapped-down France the first time France tried to implement this policy too.
However, recently:
1)France recently tried a second time and no comment from the EU has been heard.
2)Lord Mandy's propsed legislation appears to be going ahead.
3)Italy are ready to censor the internet.
What happened to suddenly make all these points "agreeable" and not challenged by the EU ?
There must have been intense lobbying and money used by copyright holders to silence the many critics of these proposals.
It appears our "democracy" is firmly under the control of commercial entities.
This is for US/UK people, to clarify things: the Corte di Cassazione (aka the Italian Supreme Court) is indeed the maximum level of interpretation of the law, but its decisions do *not* set precedents. They are mostly used as a guidance, but judges/prosecutors aren't forced to follow such an interpretation (i.e., there is some kind of discretionality).
It is worth to know here that the same court rejected an accusation on the grounds of copyright infringement because there was no profit involved.
And no, this has nothing to do with the government. The judicial system is definitely of different views with regards to the government.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
If you leave out the pay step in a restaurant, the restaurant loses money. If you leave out the pay step in a software purchase, the software company stays the same, as if you never touched the software at all.