🏴☠️ What impact will the new Italian anti-piracy law have?
By OctoSpacc
Caution
The content of this page has been entirely machine-translated into English, from Italiano. Therefore, it might contain any kind of errors.
Some will know, in Italy the new anti-piracy law has been approved, and now the doubts with which we enthusiasts of sharing free we have to deal with are different:
- When will it come into force? (I hope not exactly at the time I'm writing this post 😰)
- How much money will the entertainment lobbies have spent to ensure that the law was passed with total unanimity?
- What real consequences will it bring to us ordinary citizens?
Blocks (instant and per IP)
The point that perhaps struck me most about the law (here the PDF examined by the Commission, and the final report) - perhaps because I own various online properties, totally personal, which have zero economic value for me, but unquantifiable sentimental value - it is the obligation for Internet service providers to respond to blocking requests snapshots.
A copyright holder can send a blackout request which, when it is urgent - think of a meeting live sports, which is being illegally retransmitted in real time - must be honored in no more than 30 minutes by all providers, without any adversarial or formal process: it will be >the owner of the blocked website will then have to open legal proceedings to challenge the blocking and request its restoration.
For illicit sites, all domain and subdomain names (DNS), and IP addresses, present will be blocked and, I have no idea under what limits , all possible futures.
The new responsibilities
By "suppliers" we do not mean only the telephone operators who provide the connection to the Internet, but in general those "involved in any capacity in the accessibility" of illegal services, and it is even explicit reference to search engines.
Search engines do nothing but return links accompanied by a description, and in reality they do not directly provide pirate material: in practice , this law even aims to hinder those who only provide links, not just those who physically allow the downloading of data.
For this logic, the managers of social networks will also be held responsible (and I imagine that with "information society" in text refers specifically to them), and possibly small online communities.
An expensive firewall
The potential for abuse and errors is very high, and in fact, seen impartially, this move can in any case be summarized in the obligation for ISPs to build a mega-firewall, to all intents and purposes under the ultimate control of the State, with all the others >problems that arise from it (even accidental).
Sooner or later an over-blocking incident will happen, and there will be problems with Web services that have nothing to do with piracy, if they start messing around with address blocks IPv4.
In any case, a big hit will probably be seen on everyone's bill, even those who do not consume or share pirated material!
Centralizing a network that has existed for decades, built from the beginning as decentralized, is a tough business, and other states that work to control information know this well .
An example can be given by comparing Russia and China: both states have a certain desire to control political dissent on the Internet, but:
- For Russia it is difficult, as it has a more traditional Internet infrastructure, which began to develop as decentralized well < strong>before Putin's arrival, when the present government was of a different type.
- For China it is easier, because the government in office at the time (the Communist Party, like today), understood the potential of the Internet, and made sure that development took place immediately according to a centralized scheme.
It is therefore inevitable that raising this mega-wall-of-fire now, out of nothing, will entail substantial costs, which however will be at the total expense< /strong> of all of us consumers, instead of being at the expense of billion-dollar entertainment multinationals (which will only be burdened by the costs of the unified state platform that will connect rights holders and ISPs).
But this last detail, rightly, does not matter to our parliamentarians and senators, who fortunately for many years have received respectively 1200 and 1650 € per year just for telephone costs, thanks to those of us, idiot citizens, who pay taxes.
Hunting for users
In addition to wanting to counter in a specific and now unequivocal way the "live broadcast" of duplicate content - something that is already generating discontent among those football fans with a tight budget - apart from the usual content in general (audiovisual, print, or IT), the law expressly goes against end users , at least a certain category.
In fact, fines of up to €5000 are foreseen in the event of a repeat offense, for those who (as far as I can understand, from reading the law and watching other people's videos and articles) purchase subscriptions to paid pirate services, such as the famous "pezzotti", the illegal IPTV packages.
Are some okay?
All in all, despite the initial fear and general alarmism, it seems that the only users who have something to fear are precisely the latter, because - although it must be said that I know relatively little about the law, and it is not easy to apply generic text comprehension skills on legal bricks, so who knows - the text talks about purchasing or renting, and not also things like downloading at no cost >.
If, therefore, up to now, surfing the Internet to find links to "crisp" football matches, with pixels has never actually been prohibited as big as biscuits and the habit of buffering, or download the tenth film of the week via torrent, or even stocking up > of free video games repackaged, one can well imagine that things will remain as they are in this sense.
...Maybe not absolutely
Definitely less peaceful moments could be experienced by those who participate in the sharing of copied content, even with a torrent left in seeding >.
In Italy it seems that no single seeder has ever been prosecuted, nor has his connection ever been blocked, but with the authorization to block IP addresses the situation risks changing, and perhaps from today ISPs will have to stop throwing away lawyers' letters ; if not the hundreds who arrive every day from the United States, with the presumption of wanting a US-only law to be respected in Europe (the DMCA), at least those few Italian annuals do (assuming they really exist!).
It's not just the "digital mafia" that will suffer
Those who are worse off in this whole story are certainly the members of the "digital mafia" - as Massimiliano Capitanio, commissioner of AGCOM - that is, those who sell premium pirated packages , profiting: for them, fines of up to €15.5m and prison of up to 3 years.
Perhaps, if this new law targeted only them, there wouldn't be much to discuss: they have no passion for sharing, only that of money.
Perhaps there would not be much of an objection even if, by going against the platforms that make certain links available, we considered acting only against those profit-making companies: Google, Microsoft ( with Bing), Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
But in Italy they have already blown up TNTVillage, and I don't want the decimation of all the other online marketplaces created < strong>by the people for the people - non-profit, and indeed often disposable, both in time and money - just because it bothers someone that the main functionality of the Web is used: hypertext links, invented to encourage the free and free sharing of culture and entertainment, without barriers.