plainwhitetoast - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Is it retroactive? (Score 2, Informative) 223

by plainwhitetoast on Friday February 01, 2008 @02:50PM (#22264730) Attached to: Italian Parliament To Mistakenly Legalize MP3 P2P

IANAL but AFAIK here in Italy, if with a new law something BECOMES illegal, then that law can't be retroactive and you can't be judged for what you did BEFORE the law came out.
But if with a new law something that was illegal becomes legal, then in pending judicial cases defendants are acquitted because "the fact isn't offence anymore".

Submission + - Italian parliament to mistakenly legalize mp3 p2p

Submitted by plainwhitetoast on Friday February 01, 2008 @07:11AM

plainwhitetoast writes: As says an article on La Repubblica.it (in Italian), according to notorious Italian lawyer Andrea Monti (copyright and internet expert), the new Italian copyright law would authorize users to publish and freely share copyrighted music (p2p included). The new law, already approved by both chamber of deputies and senate, says indeed that is allowed the free publication through the Internet, free of charge, of images and music at low resolution or degraded for scientific or educational use, and only when such use is not for lucre. As Andrea Monti says in the interview, those who wrote it didn't realise that the word "degraded" is technical, with a very precise meaning, which includes mp3s: as you all surely already know, mp3s are compressed with an algorithm that implies quality loss. The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have a notable impact on pending p2p judicial cases. According to the article Enzo Mazza, president of the FIMI (Federation of the Italian music industry), stated that they're not worried about this new law because they already know how the ministry's decree will be (how strange that somebody has previews on government's decrees, but declarations like this are made daily in Italy, without care). He also added that in such decree, will be considered for educational use only those websites that deal officially with didactics like academic institutions, an that even professors' personal websites will be excluded. But Andrea Monti commented that would be impossible to set such limits, because the Italian Constitution authorizes every citizen to make didactic and scientifical divulgation. The only chance for politicians to avoid p2p legalization (and therefore the de-facto destruction music copyright) would be to slow down the process of the ministerial decree (so that the new law remains ineffective) and in the meantime hurry to amend the law. We'll see what's going to happen, but in the meantime, what a thrill for copyright holders...

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