Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Legally Considered a TV Station In Italy
orzetto writes "Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that YouTube and similar websites based on user-generated content will be considered TV stations (Google translation of Italian original) in Italian law, and will be subject to the same obligations. Among these, a small tax (500 €), the obligation to publish corrections within 48 hours upon request of people who consider themselves slandered by published content, and the obligation not to broadcast content inappropriate for children in certain time slots. The main change, though, is that YouTube and similar sites will be legally responsible for all published content as long as they have any form (even if automated) of editorial control. The main reason for this is probably that it will force YouTube to assume editorial responsibility for all published content, which facilitates the ongoing € 500M lawsuit of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi against YouTube because of content copyrighted by Berlusconi's TV networks that some users uploaded on YouTube. Berlusconi's Spanish TV station, TeleCinco, was previously defeated in court on the grounds that YouTube is not a content provider."
The best response to this would be "No more YouTube for Italy!"
In America, Dominos is legally considered pizza.
the obligation not to broadcast content inappropriate for children in certain time slots
Given the nature of the internet being worldwide, that would be.... never.
But seriously, how do they expect to enforce this??
This is what happens when the leader of a country also controls the largest media conglomerate of that country. Control the media, and you control the people. Control the people, and you *keep* control of the media.
how do you correct keyboard cat?
Anybody want my mod points?
According to Wikipedia, Berlusconi first became prime minister in 1994.
It bottles the mind how ridiculous his rule is. The guy personally owns large parts of the media in the country and gets laws passed to keep him out of trouble. The part about controversies in the Wikipedia article about him is tl;dr...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi#Controversies
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
In 1946.
(it was a banana kingdom before that)
See, this is where I think Google should call Berlusconi's bluff. All they need to do is redirect Italian IPs to a page that says, "Due to the legal implications of new regulations, Google can no longer provide service to Italian site visitors" followed by a few informational links. Then, they just sit back and wait for public outcry to force the Italian government to backpedal, and continue on as usual.
When Berlusconi was first elected as Prime Minister, in 1994. Apparently you haven't been reading the news.
Yeah, right. There was no corruption in Italy prior to 1994.
Where can I purchase your bottled mind?
Unless that guy owns all the companies which made the products you listed, you will only punish Italian companies and Italian workers because of one clueless politician.
When Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
All this will wind up doing is forcing YouTube to block Italian IP addresses. Problem solved. Then it's up to the outcries of the Italian people to get this retarding ruling reversed.
Ah, it's a nice change from the media owning the president :)
And to make the joke complete, make sure someone gets that on video and then upload it to YouTube.
Wow, 16 years. 16 years is way too long for an upper leadership role in any supposedly democratic country.
There is a war going on for your mind.
And who voted that clueless politician in again?
There is a war going on for your mind.
So are you a US citizen? Just curious.
Sudo Youtube is a TV Station.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"The main change, though, is that YouTube and similar sites will be legally responsible of all published content as long as they have any form (even if automated) of editorial control."
Fine. Get rid of editorial control. All of it.
But then the Italian version of the RIAA/MPAAA/ASCAP/Insert your acronym here, are barred from suing, because there isn't any responsibility for the content except by the posters themselves.
Sounds fine by me.
--
BMO
Trust me, America's gotten laughed at plenty. Everybody just laughs quietly, or behind our backs, because we've got enough firepower to end any country around.
"In 1946.
(it was a banana kingdom before that)"
Bananas is right. "Before that" isn't right as it still is "bananas".
What I don't understand is how that guy is still in power, given that Italy is a democracy. If you look at his record as a politician, there's practically nothing positive there, and more negativity than all other European heads of state combined.
When South Korea passed a law that requires large websites with user-generated contents to collect user's personal information, Google simply disabled the uploading and commenting features in YouTube for Korean users and encouraged them to set their locale to some other country. This continued for a year, shining a spotlight on South Korea's stupid law until the government gave up and exempted YouTube from the law.
sudo Youtube is a TV station.
Ok.
I know Italy isn't exactly a renegade terrorist dictatorship or anything, but such actions by a government with such a blatant conflict of interest is just wrong in principle. I think the U.S. government should put on its white hat and publicly take a stand against this. I mean, suppose Rupert Murdoch became prime minister of Australia and decided to fine any website that contradicted Fox News. Why should the U.S. cooperate with that?
Looking at it from a completely different angle, if putting videos where Italians can see them makes YouTube an Italian television station, then every website in the world that streams audio is an Italian radio station, and every news site is an Italian newspaper. The whole concept is patently ridiculous.
Without having read the post or article, here is my shot at what is going on just based on the headline: Counting youtube as a TV station obligates it to be regulated or otherwise bound by some strictures that will hinder its ability to compete with some media outlet(s) owned by Berlusconi.
That has to be one of the longer ones that I've seen. Having read through his controversies I think he's a bigger douche bag than what I had thought before.
TaoPhoenix is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
He's been in and out. Although his current tenure is probably a post-WWII record-breaker for Italy, which has gone through a lot of unstable coalitions.
David Eddings suggested the ultimate version of this in the Tamuli series in the Second Chapter of 'The Shining Ones'
On the Tegan government:
'Our elected officials have no outside interests. As soon as they're elected, everything they own is sold, and the money's put into the national treasury. If the economy prospers during their term in office, their wealth earns them a profit. If the economy collapses, they lose everything'
'That's absurd. No government ever makes a profit.
'Ours does,' she said smugly, 'and it has to be a real profit. The tax rates are set and cannot be changed, so our officials can't generate a false profit by simply raising taxes.'
'Why would anyone want to be an official in a government like that?'
'Nobody wants to be, Prince Sparhawk. Most Tegans do everything they possibly can to avoid election. The fact that a man's own personal fortune's in the treasury forces him to work just as hard as he possibly can to make sure that the government prospers. Many have worked themselves to death looking after
the interests of the Republic.'
You should get over to Holtålen in Trønderlag, which is roughly Mid-Norway. .... like it? Not sure.
We have selected Arbeiderpariet to "rule" the commune for the past 100 years, 100 years of being reelected.
It is insane, and we
No doubt with Berlusconi owning TV stations and setting policy, there are all sorts of gravy flowing from tax payers to TV stations for google to now tap into? Make lemonade! I mean, IF there were something like "tax break if you show more than X hours of educational material in a year", google need just apply RIAA mathematics to show that they show positive infinity hours of educational material in a year.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
http://xkcd.com/838/
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
to my knowledge, prime ministers are always appointed, not elected.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Businesses with contrary interests do sometimes crop up as a heavy counterweight to the bad behavior of another business, practically speaking.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Who votes for the prime minister?
I always wondered where this setting was...
Italy has always been corrupt, but Berlusconi took it to entirely new levels.
Surprisingly, his coalitions do tend to be more stable than those of the opposition. He probably has his ways to keep everybody in line.
It's easy to explain: he controls the media. He can make himself look good and his opposition look bad. The fact that his coalitions tend to be more stable also helps, I'm sure.
Hell Yes. Now I can catch Italian Law and Order re-runs. I'm glad someone is thinking of the children for once.
Well, just to get Godwin into play, there were pogroms before Hitler.
It's a matter of magnitude and blatantness. At least the politicians before Berlusconi tried to hide the fact that they're corrupt and for sale. He doesn't even bother trying.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I dunno, what's better, the corporations owning the government or the government owning the corporations? Personally, I consider both broken systems.
Separation of powers was a good idea. There's a reason pretty much all democracies rely on the separation of the powers to make laws, to execute laws and to judge. Unfortunately the creators of our systems couldn't foresee the power the media and corporations would wield.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, that's not really hard. Has there been an Italian government that managed to survive the standard legislative period before? IIRC the average tenure was a year or so.
My guess is that Italy was just looking for some stability after decades of stagnation and inability to get anything done because of the perpetual campaigning. I can only hope that they had enough stability bought by insane power concentration soon.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, but it's hopefully not the same guy for all those years. Or is it true that freezing keeps things fresh longer?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Imagine Fox News being pretty much the only network, or at least the one that 99% of the people watch.
You think the GOP would rule for the next few decades?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In other words, if they're a democracy, then at some point the people will get to vote for someone who eventually appoints someone, and Italian companies back them with money.
So punishing Italian companies and workers is quite on target.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Easily. YouTube complies or is fined.
Oh, you mean how they're supposed to comply? Not at all, of course. It's one of these laws that are not supposed to be heeded, it's a law that's supposed to eliminate a competitor. In this case, a competitor for the public opinion against Berlusconi's monopoly.
They're not supposed to be able to comply. They're supposed to shut up and be gone.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Can somebody please go and explain to Italy what the Internet is?
Go out on the street. Ask people if they know what "Bing" is. Besides "huh?" you'll probably get to hear a lot of very interesting and funny guesses before you find the first person who actually knows about the search engine by that name.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Posting is the only way really. It doesn't matter much anyway. I'm karma-capped, and the post was, sadly, the truth.
I know there is (was?) an issue with *Chrome* and Slashdot and copy/paste, but this is the first time I heard of it affecting Safari.
BTW, I just copied and pasted that quote to Slashdot with Safari 5.0.3 (6533.19.4). :-)
it should be pretty obvious to anyone that you can't have a democracy when the media is controlled by the person in power. yes, so obvious in fact that it seemed a mighty clever joke on my part. is it that hard to extend your thesis to an oligarchy? because the democracy you imagine is not happening here in the USA _any better_ than Venezuela, and the reason the so-called 'beacon of democracy' is nothing of the sort is very much due to the corporate monopoly on the media. cf Venezuela, allowing oligarchs to dominate the airwaves to promote the destruction of a wildly popular leader, simply so that they can restore their slave colony is not de facto anti-democratic, while the USA is right now dusting off discredited deeply anti-democratic claims of "sedition", or calling for an internet "kill switch" to control this last avenue for real democratic free speech, in response to a trivial threat to the republic (obviously it's not trivial from the POV of elite privilege, which tells you all you need to know about this unprecedented intl extralegal mobilization)
look sig is kool
"allowing oligarchs" should read "restricting oligarch's ability"
look sig is kool
Sadly this is true as most of the main-stream media in this country has been taken over by those with a corporate agenda (or by individuals with a political agenda, i.e. Rupert Murdoch). What's disappearing in this country is objective journalism. We don't really have a news media that is independently funded like the BBC, which is funded by British taxpayers but is mostly independent of the government. I think the closest we have is PBS with shows like Frontline which sadly gets labeled as "liberal media" because some of the stories they run are counter to the corporate or right-wing agenda.
I would not compare it with what's going on in Venezuela or Russia since that is far more controlled than the media is here. There are still independent media over here, it is just that they are often drowned out by the large media companies.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Hail Eris!
"The media" does not own the US presidency; the _corporations_ own them both.
Snarky
All Hail Discordia!
Snarky
"To have too much and not enough is like a boat person with sideburns."
Hail Eris!
I wasn't aware the US had ever even had a prime minister! Colour me stunned...
Snarky
All Hail Discordia!
Snarky
"To have too much and not enough is like a boat person with sideburns."