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Italian Parliament To Mistakenly Legalize MP3 P2P
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Feb 01, 2008 11:02 AM
from the need-a-do-over dept.
from the need-a-do-over dept.
plainwhitetoast recommends an article in La Repubblica.it — in Italian, Google translation here. According to Italian lawyer Andrea Monti, an expert on copyright and Internet law, the new Italian copyright law would authorize users to publish and freely share copyrighted music (p2p included). The new law, already approved by both legislative houses, indeed says that one is allowed to publish freely, through the Internet, free of charge, images and music at low resolution or "degraded," for scientific or educational use, and only when such use is not for profit. As Monti says in the interview, those who wrote it didn't realize that the word "degraded" is technical, with a very precise meaning, which includes MP3s, which are compressed with an algorithm that ensures a quality loss. The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.
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Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:2)
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:4, Funny)
You then get the Vinyl sound from a CD.
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That is just silly.
The only reason some people prefer vinyl over CD is that in many cases vinyl recordings are mastered differently - more dynamics etc, since mostly audiophiles buy them. There is no way that anyone can hear any improvement in actual recording quality in vinyl compared to a CD recording (16 bits per sample, 44100 samples per second). Just because vinyl isn't as easily quantised as digital data doesn't mean that it has infinite resolution.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It is however possible to capture the 'warmer' sound on CD.
Its got nothing to do with data rates.
Its the physical medium and the processing it goes through.
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you can't because all the technical reasons for why one is better or both are equal is a smoke screen. The real arguments can be boiled down to this:
Simply put, there is nothing that one side could say that would convince the other they are right because it has nothing to do with the tech and everything to do with the vinyl guys thinking the digitals are deaf, and the digitals thinking the vinyls are loons.
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Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:5, Informative)
If you do a double blind test with the direct signal from the turntable compared to the same through 16bit 44.1KHz digital ad/da conversion, people cannot tell the difference. In any properly set up and level matched trial. Ever.
The problem is that the vinyl believers cannot accept this, and either will not try it, or do not have the facilities to do a proper test themselves.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't just that the $50,000 tube amp buying $1000 knob (to make the music "warmer") buying nuts think that digitals are deaf, but that the audiofools, I mean audiophiles refuse any tests. They won't compare the best of digital to the best of whatever they like. Double blind studies with good equipment on both sides *always* finds no difference. Th
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Jeez, why so emotional over the fact that vinyl sounds better to some people?
Because they don't just say "this sounds better to me", they say "this is better technology", a claim which is at odds with reality, and some people have an emotional response to bullshit.
25mb of data just isn't the same as essentially infinite data on vinyl. Analog is infinitely variable- digital is not.
Analog isn't "infinitely variable", it's just limited by factors that are harder to measure. Instead of nice, solid numbers like "16 bits per sample" and "44,100 samples per second", you have to look at materials, noise levels added by every analog component in the system, etc. But just because those limiting factors are
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've made mix CDs for my car. Some of the tunes are 320 bit rate MP3s my daughter got somewhere (don't ask, don't tell) and some are straight bit for bit copies from the CD. It's a good six speaker system, but far from audiophile. And at 55 years old I hardly have "golden ears". But I can hear the difference between the MP3s and the straight CD rips.
Now with your typical two little speakers and a "subwoofer" (we used to have bigger woofers, in fact my
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Whether i read an mp3 from my ipod, my cd player or from a hard drive it's the same mp3, the only difference will be the decoder used.
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
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The key is to get the Mafia supporting this, so that they can view the RIAA as a threat to the business, and treat 'em accordingly.
mafIAA (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:mafIAA (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:mafIAA (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:mafIAA (Score:4, Funny)
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M.A.F.I.A. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)
(Music And Film Industry Association of America)
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Mistakenly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mistakenly? (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Italy's government
B) The knowledge of 50+ yr old career politicians w/regards to technology
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Re:Mistakenly? (Score:5, Funny)
And what about the marketing/mafia/legal knowledge of the NASA technology experts radiating "across the universe" from The Beatles to the whole Universe? I sense a massive URIAA (universal Riaa) and his legal team from Omicron IV to beat the hell out those NASA nerds. Or is it going to be transmitted with DRM? The amount of cease-and-desist-letters rain coming from outer space will make the leonids a picnic. Just imagine, we discover an extraterrestrial life form represented by: their lawyers. We could be starting a war here. The rammifications are endless.
http://gizmodo.com/351542/space-aliens-first-to-get-drm+free-beatles-music [gizmodo.com]
TFA:
You may have heard that at 7pm EST on Feb. 4, NASA plans to blast The Beatles' song "Across the Universe" into deep space in order to serenade otherworldly beings hundreds, thousands or millions of light years away with our very best pop music. I have several problems with this.
For starters, NASA: You got the choice of the entire Beatles catalog, and you pick a song only because it contains a relevant metaphor? I mean, have you ever listened to Revolver? Wait, actually, you clearly must've, since Paul McCartney performed "Good Day Sunshine" in Nov. 2005 for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. If you're aiming at aliens, why not choose something a little less intelligible, like "Dig a Pony," "Come Together" or "Tomorrow Never Knows." If those weren't written for space aliens, I don't know what.
Next on my shitlist: EMI and Apple Corp. WTF???? I've been a lifelong fan of your stupid Fab Four, but you're giving six billion purple globules from the Crab Nebula a shot at digitally retrieving The Beatles before I get one single measly 99-cent download? How is that fair? (Of course, the complete Beatles catalog is already on my iPod, but still!)
And finally, a message to the Crab people: Don't trust these downloads. You'll see the file streaming into your antenna array and you'll be like, "Sweet! Free music!" But then you open the file, and you get this message on your Crab Nebula equivalent of Windows Media Player 11, saying that in order to enjoy this track, you need to get authorization from a central server. You click okay, and the message has to travel back to earth, taking another 50,000 years or so. Which may seem worth the wait, only the track itself expires in 30 days.
So good luck to you, purple Crab people. And GFY, recording industry. You have dissed me for the last time. [Network World via The Inquirer]
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Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Funny)
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Is it up to date? Is it progressive VS any other codec out there? Do you need GBs of music to better understand the format, or only maybe one song at every different combinations of encoding?
Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Informative)
Not when you can accomplish the same thing without violating copyrights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list [wikipedia.org]
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000012.shtml [digitalpreservation.gov]
http://www.id3.org/mp3Frame [id3.org]
http://www.dv.co.yu/mpgscript/mpeghdr.htm [dv.co.yu]
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Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
Taking into account the new Italian copyright law, you're actually not violating any copyrights anyway.
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Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Meaning of words (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but if the word is being used with a different meaning to how it is commonly used, then the law has to define that meaning. Does this law do that?
Also, I don't speak Italian, but as far as English is concerned, it's not merely a "technical" definition, the common meaning of the word "degraded" applies to the MP3 encoding process. The mistake, if any, isn't that the word was used incorrectly, it's that they didn't define the level of degradation necessary.
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Definition (Score:5, Interesting)
That would have required that the law exactly defined the meaning "a bassa risoluzione o degradate" (it:low resolution or degraded). See for example how copyright law functions in most countries (except in country that killed their Fair Use like the US) : "fair use" allows you to ignore the interdiction to copy, and then the law usually explain with great details what constitutes faire use and what not (backup, format-shift, quotes/citations, etc...)
It's not the case with the Italian law, it just says "low res or degraded". So normally one would expect to reasonably interpret the law. Now most of the data you find on P2P networks are recompressed, using lossy algorithm. You can mathematically prove in an indisputable way that this step degrades the data by introducing artefacts and approximations (the strategy by which lossy algorithms actually manage to compress data). You can also show that a lot of movie may have a lower resolution (16:9 widescreen 720x576 to square pixel 640x360 is a common conversion, lower PDA- and handheld-console compatible resolution are also found).
Thus how the law will be interpreted is : "lossy MP3, OGG/Vorbis and X264 repacks non-for-profit are OK ; WAVs, FLACs, straigh-ripped 8GB ISO or for profit are NOT".
If the local antenna of MPAA is unhappy, this interpretation will have to be challenged in court and set a precedent. But as I said before, the degradation induced by repacking using lossy compression is mathematically provable and the corporation will have a hard time trying to prove that exchanging MP3 on a P2P network infringes on this law.
Corporation will probably settle for the more easy route exploiting "The Pirate Bay" hole, trying to prove that during the operation some profit was made and thus the sharer are infringing on the "not for profit" part of the law.
Or will push around to force distributors to use copyrighted media into already already converted into lossy format (selling DRMed lossy music files instead of CDs, or moving the DVB-T transmission to MPEG-4/H263 and AVC/H264 so people won't need to recompress from MPEG2), so that either the p2p user will exchange the same files as the copyrighted material (and break the law) or that the p2p users will have to further compress the files (introducing additional degradation and lowering the quality to the point that legally authorised p2p won't be interesting).
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But it's not degraded... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Copyright law only concerns the source of the copy (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, when some user converts the CD tracks into MP3 and puts them on P2P, and the MP3 found on webstores aren't the same product. At all.
That would be claiming copyright infringement on some picture you took with your camera of some public monument - on the ground that an artist is selling a poster of the same monument and your p
Legal actions (Score:4, Insightful)
And what is educational use? I think there is somewhere a law what tells it is for education when it is used on schools or any other official educational usage. But not on personal usage, what would still be illegal.
Re:Legal actions (Score:4, Funny)
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Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
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Makes sense: share MP3, but not WAV from CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
This will keep ordinary people happy in Italy and allow the community sharing that comes naturally, while ensuring that the *ACTUAL* music product of the labels (CDs of uncompressed WAV data) are excluded and therefore protected from sharing, or er
Note that music fans will continue to buy the CDs of the favorite bands regardless of file sharing --- that's what fans do. The sharing is really just free promotion.
Of course, the labels will hate it, but then they hate anything other than open access to peoples' wallets.
Science Project (Score:4, Funny)
Lost in translation... (Score:5, Informative)
The important caveat is that although the lawyer (Monti) says that this was a mistake, it will not pose too many problems while it gets fixed. He says that while in the mean time, the law be enforced in such a way that only websites that belong to scientific or academic institutions will be allowed to host these mp3s and it will not even cover websites from professors or scientists even if for scientific or teaching purposes. This was said despite the fact that the Italian law allows anyone to make a website that accomplishes the same things (teach or do research or whatever). Monti said that it will be easier to regulate it in this fashion while the bill gets changed.
The previous example cited was kind of butchered from the translation as well. It said that in 2000 another mistake in the use of technical jargon created a law that legalized all pirated satellite TV decoder cards. Although the law was eventually changed, all charges had to be dropped on current pirates of said cards in the mean time.
They expect the same to happen while they fix this new mishap.
Being Italian myself and seeing the current state of the government (what government) I'm not entirely sure that this didn't happen on purpose to allow current charges to be dropped and so on and so forth...Call me paranoid, but if you've lived in Italy as a citizen, then you'll know what I mean.
My two euros.
Higher authorities (Score:5, Insightful)
The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.
...Which will shortly be reversed when higher courts at European level find that such a law in Italy is in conflict with the relevant European directives.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but this will last about as long as the shenanigans in France a few years ago.
Re:Higher authorities (Score:4, Funny)
I thought the Irish had a monopoly on shenanigans? Don't the French have their own silly word?
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Mistakenly? (Score:4, Interesting)
In other related news, Springfield's paper is reporting [sj-r.com] (DOH!) that "Two men were caught Wednesday night with hundreds of DVDs and compact discs, packaged for illegal resale, inside their car... A police report indicated one of the men was arrested; however, a check of jail records showed he was not booked in."
Good thing those guys were just selling 500 bootleg DVDs and 500 bootleg CDs. If they'd ripped them to (degraded) MP3 and posted them for free on the internet, lets do the math here at $100,000.00 per track...
Wise to share this info now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tech Ignorance Breaks The Other Way Once (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it serves best as the exception that proves the rule; ignorance in the legislative, executive, and judicial processes tends to lead to oligarchy designed by moneyed (or otherwise potent) special interests.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I hear you can sue McDonalds for a lot of $$$ if you do that!
Re:This is wonderful (Score:5, Interesting)
If you isten to the KISS vinyl album with the song "Mister Speed" on it (the album cover just says "kiss") you can hear bleedthrough on the master tape on one tune, and if you listen to the first Aerosmith album on vinyl you can hear tape hiss. Pink Floyd fired their first label for that kind of crap!
But if you make a CD of Led Zeppelin's "Presence" or Boston's first vinyl albums with a good enough turntable, your home made CD will have more dynamic range and better frequency response than the store-bought CD.
-mcgrew
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