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."

Comments

Enlighten about technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a technological matter. If a country wants to censor a communication medium, it can certainly do so. It will never be 100 percent effective, but censorship does restrict availability of information. We should not fall back to a "we can get around it" position. While that is true, most people will not get around it and controlling their access to information is an undue power.

Not the point ...

[golodh]

Knowing a thing or two about Italy and its love for byzantine legal constructs, I fear that the effectiveness of such measures isn't their primary purpose. Their PR effect, however, is.

Italy has plenty of laws that would totally paralyze every aspect of public and private life, were they to be rigorously enforced. Such laws look terrific on paper but don't have any practical effect except in lawsuits where they can be (and are) routinely used to club people over the head with. Anyone who has ever driven a car in an Italian city South of Rome (Naples for example, or tried to cross the street in the same city at a pedestrian crossing that's showing a green light for pedestrians) knows all about the practical value of laws in Italy.

This little decision will satisfy officials who can now tout it as a bold step towards curbing piracy. This is important. Just remember that their prime minister, Berlusconi, owns a whole chain of content-creating enterprises. He can't afford to look "soft on piracy" and retain his credibility in business circles.

As one or two nerdish forum members may already have figured out, blocking a torrent site or two won't necessarily stop people from finding or downloading torrents. To put it mildly.

The only thing it *will* do is to slowly erode yet another form of legal freedom in Italy and afterwards in the rest of Europe.

That's all folks.

Re:Not the point ...

[the_xaqster]

The problem will come when another of the EU countries (yes, I am looking at you, England) will hold this law up as a shining example of government doing good, and then enact a law that embraces and extends this law into something completely different, more costly, more annoying, but ultimately just as useless.

Just don't get me started on what will happen if Brussels gets hold of it....

Re:Someone needs to enlighten certain geeks...

[AGMW]

Like most people (here at least!) I'm not happy about the way the big media companies are rail-roading governments around the world to shore up their failing businesses - and even more unhappy at how the Governments are cow-towing to the media moguls and allowing themselves to be manoeuvred into generating more legislation (and don't get me started about ministers feathering their nests before the next election!) ... but copyright isn't all bad! If you create something it isn't unfair to expect people to pay for it!