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.
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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.
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
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.
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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.
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.