🏴‍☠️ What impact will the new Italian anti-piracy law have?

Some will know, in Italy the new anti-piracy law has been approved, and now the doubts that we enthusiasts of free sharing 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 this 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](https://temi.camera.it/leg19/dossier/OCD18-17872/disposizioni-contrasto-illecita-trasmissione-o-diffusione-diretta-e-della-fruizione-illegale-contenuti- protected-by-right-d.html)) - 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 the providers of Internet services to respond to instant block requests.

A copyright holder can send a blackout request which, when it is urgent - think of a live sports match, which is being illegally rebroadcast in real time - must be honored in no later than 30 minutes by all providers, without any adversarial or formal process: it will be the owner of the blocked website who will then have to open legal proceedings for * dispute the block* and request reinstatement.
For illicit sites, all domain and subdomain names (DNS), and IP addresses, present and, I have no idea according to what limits, all possible future ones are blocked.

The new responsibilities

By “suppliers” we do not mean only telephone operators, who provide the connection to the Internet, but in general those “involved in any capacity in the accessibility” of illegal services, and explicit reference is even made to ** search engines**.

Search engines do nothing other than return links accompanied by a description, and actually do not directly provide pirated material: in practice, this law even aims to hinder those who only provide links, not just those who allow the downloading of data physically.

For this logic, the managers of social networks will also be held responsible (and I imagine that “information society” in the text refers precisely to them), and possibly *small communities * online.

An expensive firewall

The potential for abuse and errors is very high, and in fact, viewed impartially, this move can in any case be summarized as the obligation for ISPs to build a [mega-firewall] (https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-mega-firewall-could-render-italian-isps-liable-for-over-blocking-230413/), for all intents and purposes under the control last of the State, with all the other problems that derive 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 with IPv4 address blocks.

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 before Putin’s arrival, when the present government was of another 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 ensured 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 of all of us consumers, instead of being at expenses of the 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](https://www.laleggepertutti.it/ 353259_how-much-do-parliamentarians-earn), 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 contents in general (audiovisual, press, or IT), the law expressly goes against end users, [at least a certain category](https://torrentfreak.com/ew- pirate-iptv-bill-moved-to-senate-as-italy-takes-on-digital-mafias-230324/).

In fact, fines of up to €5000 are foreseen in case of repeat offenses, 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, like the famous “pezzotti”, the illegal IPTV packets.

Are some okay?

All in all, despite the initial general fear and 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 understanding skills some text on legal bricks, so who knows - the text talks about buying or renting, and not even things like downloading for free.

If, therefore, up to now, surfing the Internet to find links to “crunchy” football matches, with pixels as big as biscuits and the habit of buffering, has never actually been prohibited, or download the tenth movie of the week via torrent, or even stock up on repackaged video games for free, one can well imagine that things will remain as they are in this sense.

…Maybe not at all

Decidedly less calm moments could instead be experienced by those who participate in sharing copied content, even with a torrent left in seeding.
In Italy it seems that no single seeder has never been prosecuted, nor has their connection ever been blocked, but with the authorization to block of IP addresses the situation risks **changing , and perhaps from today ISPs will have to stop trashing 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 actually exist!).

Not only the “digital mafia” 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] calls it(https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki /Autorit%C3%A0_per_le_garanzie_nelle_communications) - i.e. 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 you wouldn’t object much even if, by going against the platforms that make certain links available, you 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 squares created by the people for the people - non-profit, and indeed often wasteful, both in time and money - just because someone is annoyed by using the main functionality of the Web: hyperlinks, invented to encourage free sharing and free of culture and entertainment, without barriers.