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."
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.
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.
Jurists != Jurors.
A jurist usually means anyone with a law degree, although in some countries it is generally reserved to refer to judges.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
Judgement by "normal" people is something that was feared a lot in writing the Italian Consitution, because we had seen how it worked with fascism. The principle that people support is enough to justify everything is the essence of fascism and one of the scary mantras of Mr. Berlusconi.
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!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
From another POV, you can see that Goverments everywhere welcome any possiblity of increasing their power, and censorship/media control is quite powerhouse.
The fact that someone else (entertainment industry) will take all the blame for it is icing on cake, especially as entertainment industry can run its own propaganda campaign to justify it.
Is it goverment allowing themseles to be maneuvred or media moguls being played to be white horses?
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So you end up with censorship infrastructure for your use and with someone else taking blame for all of it happening. Its quite a victory!
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
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
No, they can charge the customer agreed to when they opened the account. What the Supreme Court said was "If you don't like the charges, don't open the account. Don't expect the courts to bail you out on something you agreed to."
And this is good for two reasons:
i) Personal responsibility is a good thing.
ii) My banking is free, because people who pay unauthorised-overdraft fees subsidise it.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
I think you're absolutely right to be worried. I'm going to talk about the UK situation since that's what I know about, but the situation EU-wide is largely as you describe: governments are caving to copyright owners.
Before saying anything else, it's worth making clear that the "3 strikes" legislation contains nothing to do with three strikes. It is totally silent on the specifics of the chances that have to be given to internet users before they can be cut off and leaves the question entirely to a "code" that has not yet been written and so cannot be reviewed before the bill becomes law. You can read more about this at the link I gave above. The "new" bill pays lip-service to the Government's "commitment to human rights", and seems to be relying on this "code" to avoid the criticism of the EU. However, as the link above makes clear, it gives the Secretary of State a get-out clause to get past the code if he wants to, with little to no oversight or controls.
There's a lot of confusion, even on Slashdot, about the content of the bill. To break down the sections on Copyright infringement (taken from http://www.digitalwrong.org/?page_id=6), the new process in case of alleged infringement is:
This goes absolutely against the presumption of innocence that is such an important part of a modern democracy.
If this all sounds a bit worrying, there is some good news. The bill is entering its committee stage on the 6th of January, and this is the best chance to change it before it reaches the House of Commons, at which point its progress will be faster and more subject to the party whip. So please, write to a Lord and explain to them why the measure is bad, either morally or because - as has even been admitted by the impact assessment - network security means the wrong people will be punished, and what they can do to change it - i.e. go to the open committee session starting on the 6th and change the bill.
Things are advancing very quickly, and I appreciate that not everyone has time to read the 300+ pages of the bill, the debates, the notes and the impact assessment, so if anyone has any questions on their contents please ask and I will answer them. Otherwise, please write in before it's too late, and spread the word - either online or offline - about the travesty that is the Digital Economy Bill.
hang on a second. a few weeks ago slashdot ran a story about how MPAA memebers enjoyed a record box office year, so how are they failing and making record sales at the same time?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If someone is overdrawn by £2 and then the bank charges a £35 unauthorised-overdraft is "fair"
If someone is in financial difficulty and the bank keeps charging £35 unauthorised-overdraft fees every month thus compounding the problem. That person could have lost thier job.
These are not hyperthetical scenarios - this has happened to people I know and to a certain degree myself too.
I'm all for personal responsibility and "free" banking is nice.
"..they can charge the customer agreed to.. " - Yeah we all know how banks responsible banks have been recently.
I'm tempted to say your post is troll-like but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and put it down to retarded-like ignorance.
Is it goverment allowing themseles to be maneuvred or media moguls being played to be white horses?
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So you end up with censorship infrastructure for your use and with someone else taking blame for all of it happening. Its quite a victory!
True, never attribute to incompetence that which could be malice!
Governments trying to grab more power!? The Hell You Say! Oh ... yes ... OK ... yer, that might be happening too. Certainly having an infrastructure that gives power to the Gov isn't going to be something they fight against too hard - Lord Voldeson-er-Mandlemort's new digital bill amendment for example, that allows new powers to be drawn up without recourse to any discussions or voting on the matter in Parliament!
See also all this climate change shenanigans: That's going to give Governments even more power (and I'm not saying the climate isn't changing, or, indeed, that it might be us at least partially responsible!).
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
This is exactly why gun manufacturers and gun stores are sued every time a crime is committed with a gun. Or why Dell is sued every time someone uses a Dell laptop in a crime.
http://www.tenjou.net/
Parent is absolutely correct. Please mod it up, and go ahead and mod me flaimbait or troll I know it's an unpopular position on here, but than again most people that stand up for fairness get shot at.
And don't tell me well the lawsuits the MPAFIAA and RIAFFIA aren't fair because I agree they are extreme, but than again so is the brazen attitude that piracy is OK. It's like Neocons vs Anarchists
both are extremes and both are stupid.
First off people on here need to stop hiding behind the veil of "Oh they are trying to restrict information" and "The don't host the files so how are they at fault!? defense. That is not working any more and it never did.
When the internet came about it was like the wild west. No rules or regulations an open space. But without law things got out of hand quick looting, murder, gambling, prostitution etc. The laws of the internet are now being written in countries and when it comes down to data links to replicas of copy-written material there weren't any rules set forth to protect the works or understanding of what was really going on to try those who were "just hosting links yo".
Yes isohunt, the piratebay, and others are indeed accessories to piracy. Which is against the law.
If you give a map of the building to a thief knowing full well what he intends to take and he robs a bank yeah you are liable.
"But I didn't rob it I was just showing him paper and ink?!" doesn't work.
And people need to learn fast that the free ride days are going to come to an end. If you want to watch a movie, download a song, or use a piece of commercial software buy it. Stop being so damn cheap, and stop saying "well I want to preview what I see before I buy it" is a huge load of crap.
There are trailers/teasers for movies as well as selected scenes released for free for you to preview them.
There are plenty of free streaming samples of songs, on amazon and itunes, and lala, and last.fm, and pandaora, and XM/Sirius , and traditional radio, and internet radio
There are typically trial versions of most software applications
So really the preview attitude is really a poor defense.
I can't go into a restaurant and preview an entire meal and then decide if I want to pay for it. You order you consume you pay for it.
And don't say "well I can send it back.. at the theaters I can't send back a movie!"... actually you can.... within 30 minutes of a film's start time you can tell the box office that you didn't like it and they will give you back your money or venue credit. Got another excuse captain cheapo?
But you haven't had to pay with this loop hole before?!...waaaaah.... and now you don't wanna?....waaaaah
Tough shit suck it up and pay what you owe.
If you don't want to pay THEN don't watch/download/use it!
where we actually want to draw the line, indeed, where is it sensible to draw the line.
Complete repeal of all copyright. Ultimately, that's where we're going anyway, the attacks on information flow and social sharing has merely resulted in technological shifts towards less open forms, and the next stage is pretty much the end game; f2f darknets re-form the whole fabric of communications into untraceable undetectable anonymous networks.
You end up with a situation where you have no scale on which to draw the line, where it's impossible to tell communications apart, you end up with a binary choice: allow communications or not.
If you still want state support of content industries, just pay them out of the state budget, from a macroeconomic point of view there's no difference between taxes and monopoly rights anyway (except taxes tend to be more efficient). Legalize copying and pay them a premium per copy to emulate the current system if you want to do that.
it even has "Pirate" in the damn name!
Oddly enough, I haven't seen them selling speedboats or peg legs. Doesn't seem like they're out to aid any piracy. And they're not called 'the copyright infringement bay', are they...?
some sort of freedom fight or otherwise worthy cause.
You don't give up ethics just because the bully's whine more. Rather the opposite; with the actions of the content industries in situations such as ACTA, it has become a moral imperative to deny them any form of revenue. Their corrosive influence on democracy and corruption of politics has made it obvious that they are intolerable to civil society in their current form.
Downloading copyrighted material never was a "crime". At most it's an actionable infringement of someone's copyright. Actionable by the copyright holder that is, not the State. It's not even a misdemeanor.
Besides, torrent sites in and by themselves were never "criminal", as they only facilitate an exchange of information which, among many other things, allows people to infringe copyrights.
Was that the first time?
According to this article it has now been passed
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2249617/french-pass-revised-three/
(article dated 16 sep)
The extreme of that fear, in turn, created a closed group that is essentially a clique of a selected elite that has none, or very little, accountability. I wonder why people here, even Italians, are tying this judgment with the government, since this so-called clique is all but in support of the current government. Not saying that people judgment is correct, but that fear caused the exact opposite. There is a dire need for some middle ground.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Arn't they run by judges who are also lawyers? It would be neat if normal people AKA jurists were in charge but I don't think that is/ever will be the case.
When the geek faces the "normal people," the judge and jury in an American court, how often does he come out a winner?
Sadly. And the fact that the content industry generates taxes that are badly needed by our nearly-broke governments won't help improve the situation. In an economy that is so reliant on commercializing (and taxing!) imaginary "goods", I have no hope to see those copyright excesses be repelled anytime soon.
I think we might be coming at this from different points of view. I don't see anything wrong with an economy that is reliant on commercializing "imaginary 'goods'" - in fact I don't really see how we could have anything else. Aside from the content industries, the insurance industry, the stock market, futures trading and any number of other sectors work by commercialising something other than physical goods. And while it may not strictly speaking be stealing, making use of these services without paying does harm the industry and does, undoubtedly, have serious consequences for its future. When talking about the content industry this means illegal file sharing, which is and should be punished.
Where I object is when we lose perspective and abandon the very principles of our justice system in order to pander to the content industry - that is what is happening now in the UK, in France, in America and probably in many other countries, and it is against this that we should be protesting. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but people calling for the abandoning of copyright and legitimization of file sharing cause a problem for those people opposing the laws currently being passed, since they make it easy to characterise the opponents of the law as selfish, short-sighted "pirates".
The Chinese legal system said Akmal Shaikh should be killed for drug smuggling. Despite this use of the legal system there, Britain found it necessary to protest.
So why should others not protest if we consider a law to be wrongly applied?
no-one has ever managed to answer reasonably
I've seen more suggestions for workable systems than I can count on my digits.
what system do you propose instead,
Personally I doubt there is any extra incentive needed at all. But I'll indulge you; if we want extra benefits for creators, personally I'm leaning towards 'creative incentive tax' structured as a VAT on any works or services derived from a specific content, payable directly to the creator. Not wholly different from how radio broadcast payments work today, but applicable in general to all protected material. Anyone can duplicate, but from any revenue derived off the duplication a percentage (not a fixed number, we're after 'competition') goes to the creator. Wal-mart wants to sell books? Fine, they can print them on demand and 50% revenue goes to the author. EMI wants to open stores? Fine, but 50% off sales goes to creator. CableCo wants to broadcast a show? Go ahead, but 50% of the segment revenue goes to the creator.
Such a system is easily tunable and you can even modify it by maxing out payment or tuning years of payment for each work to maximize incentive efficiency.
These are trivially refuted by observing that you need an Internet connection to use any of these technically clever systems
Actually, ignoring the facts of impenetrable cell networks, no, you don't need an internet connection. A 2TB disk represents a week with a 34Mbit line, and routing software making use of datastores synced anytime you meet your friends wouldn't be that hard.
You can deny them revenue by simply not using their product.
Not efficiently enough in light of the attacks on freedom and democracy.
You don't have to material under copyright illegally,
I certainly don't, but unless others can be convinced not to use that material either, they can at least be convinced not to pay for it.