18337302
submission
orzetto writes:
Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that YouTube and similar websites based on user-generated content will be considered TV stations (Google translation) 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 of all published content as long as they have any form (even if automated) of editorial control.
The main reason is likely that, being a TV, YouTube has now 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, TeleCinco, was previously defeated in court exactly on the grounds that YouTube is not a content provider.
5324167
submission
orzetto writes:
I work at a research institute, and programming models of physical models is what I do most of the time. One significant problem when modelling physical processes is finding thermodynamic data. There are some commercial solutions, but can be quite expensive, and to the best of my knowledge there are no open-source efforts in that direction. In my previous job, my company used NIST's Supertrapp, which is not really that expensive, but is written in Fortran (and an old-fashioned dialect at that). As a result, it is a bit difficult to integrate in other projects (praised be f2c), and the programming interface is simply horrible; worse, there are some Fortran-induced limitations (maximum 20 species in a mixture, for instance).
I was wondering whether it would be legal to buy a copy of such a database (they usually sell with source code, no one can read Fortran anyway), take the data (possibly reformatting it as XML), implement a new programming interface from scratch and publish the package as free software. Thermodynamic data, assuming it is correct, is not an intellectual creation but a mere measurement, which was most likely not done by the programmers but taken from the open literature, published by scientists funded by our tax money.
What are your experiences and opinions on the matter? For the record, I am based in Germany, so the EU database directive applies (German implementation).
117837
submission
orzetto writes:
Italian newspaper l'Unità reports that the European parliament's Commitee for Legal Affairs approved an amendment presented by EMP Nicola Zingaretti (PSE, IT), that makes piracy a felony—but only if a monetary profit is made (for the foreign-language impaired, see this article on Hollywood Reporter, which however does not mention that non-profit p2p will not be criminalised). As in the EU parliament's press release:
Members of the Legal Affairs' committee [...] decided that criminal sanctions should only apply to those infringements deliberately carried out to obtain a commercial advantage. Piracy committed by private users for personal, non-profit purposes are therefore also excluded.
Italian consumers' association Altroconsumo was involved in drafting the text. The complete proposal was passed with 23 votes in favour, 3 against and 3 abstained, and is intended to be applied to copyright, trademark, design and other IP fields, but not patent right which is explicitly excluded. The proposal has still to pass the vote of the parliament before becoming law in all EU countries, some of which (like Italy) do have criminal laws in place for non-profit file sharing.
Caution: Most EU countries use civil law, not common law. Translation of legal terms may be misleading.
