Italian Parliament To Mistakenly Legalize MP3 P2P 223
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.
Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Mistakenly? (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Italy's government
B) The knowledge of 50+ yr old career politicians w/regards to technology
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (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 old non-audiophile JBLs have bigger woofers than what they now call "subs") you kids are using now, you may well not hear the difference.
If you have a good car stereo, try this: Take your best factory CD and rip every other song to wav and every other song to MP3. Then burn a copy from those rips. You'll hear what I mean, especially since your ears are probably a lot better than mine.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
Taking into account the new Italian copyright law, you're actually not violating any copyrights anyway.
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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 photograph infringes the artist's copyright because they both depict the same monument. It doesn't work this way.
What is important is not what the piece of work represents. What is important is what you duplicated. Which was the "source" of your data. The colour of the bits [sooke.bc.ca] which compose the data file.
Your photograph isn't related to the artist's poster. You took picture of some monument, your photograph is related to it and as the monument is public, you can take pictures of it.
To go back to MP3 : you took a CD, you ripped it and compressed it to MP3. Those MP3s are descendant of the CD - the CD was the source of data of which you made a copy. The MP3s aren't bit for bit identical to the original material that you duplicated. They are degraded. You're safe.
The fact that some MP3 exists on some on-line store have nothing to do with the copyright law. The copyright law is only about duplicating content and at no point in time in this exemple the online store did come into play. The duplicated thing was a CD, copyright law concerns it.
Again, doesn't matter. You are *NOT* making a copy of the master or the HD-DVD. the bit that you convert aren't colored from those.
What you make a copy of is your DVD.
When proprely done, a 8GB ISO of ripped DVD is supposed to be bit-for-bit equivalent (at least regarding the multimedia content that is protect by copyright law - the file header and other metadata might change, but the data that will ultimately be sent to the screen is kept un-changed).
As opposed, for example, to shrinking (using K9Copy or something similar) the movie to fit a 4GB disc (in that case, the quality was decreased to fit in a tighter place).
Or for example, recompressing it using X264 - the conversion is lossy and it mathematically provable that degradation has resulted.
The fact that the 8GB iso is degraded when compared to some master copy at the studio that you don't have access to doesn't count. What count is the source that was used in the process of copying.
Exact copy is "no no!", degraded using lossy process is tolerated.
Exactly, in that case it won't be considered 'degraded' because what you are making and distributing copies of it the exact data as you received it (no matter what exists on some other CD that wasn't involved in the current copying).
:
That's what I meant in the end of my previous posting
- If companies continue to distribute music in CDs and movies as DVDs (or not-much compressed MPEG2 streams on digital boardcast networks), people have an incentive to make degraded copies using lossy compressors (to make data use less space). And those copies could be tolerated on P2P network under Italian law (as long as done not-for-profit).
- If companies switches their distribution channels to MP3s and more compressed digital broadcast (H264), the situation change.
There's no incentive for people to re-compress the media : what they got is already compressed.
But they don't have the right to distribute these files under any copyright law (except so
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.
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (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. The audiofools claim that the equipment wasn't good enough so the results are bad, yet refuse to stage the test themselves. Audiofools formed a religion, not a science of better sound. They aren't interested in what's correct, but finding some exisential "truth" that doesn't exist. I have no doubt that the sound from my $50 soundblaster speakers hooked up to my computer is inferior to $20,000 speakers. But how many (if any) can tell the difference between $500 and $5000 speakers? Or $5000 and $20,000 speakers?
So, using science can't convince the Pope that God doesn't exist, nor can proving scientific equivelence between two ways of storing music convince an audiofool that there isn't a difference.