Italian Parliament To Mistakenly Legalize MP3 P2P

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.

Mistakenly?

[nurb432]

Perhaps it wasn't a mistake and was intentional.

Re:Meaning of words

[dasbush]

Do you have any development documentation to prove that?
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:Educational / Scientific Use?

[plainwhitetoast]

According to the interviewed lawyer this law, written as it is, would for example permit to make a websites that publishes the entire discography of an author for review and comment purpose, or to make a p2p public network of public academies that bring music available to students for study purpose. And so on (use your imagination).
I hope he's right! :)

Definition

[DrYak]

IANAL, but just because something has a technical definition doesn't mean it can't a completely different meaning when used in a legal context.

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).

Mistakenly?

[sm62704]

In related news, last decade the US Congress mistakenly passed the DMCA.

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...

But it's not degraded...

[jgoemat]

You are thinking it's degraded from 44khz WAV files, and that's true. However since MP3s are actually being sold now through online music stores, you would have to argue that these are degraded compared to the actual product being sold. Look at your DVD analogy. You say you couldn't upload an 8gb ISO of a DVD, but isn't that 'degraded' from the original masters or even the HD-DVD version? Certainly if you bought a 256kbit MP3 from Amazon and shared it you wouldn't consider that 'degraded' since it is exactly what you purchased, right?

Re:This is wonderful

[sm62704]

I already have CDs like that [kuro5hin.org]. And oddly (ok not that odd), the MP3s actually make the pops louder.

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

Back in the day....

[Anonymous Coward]

Bootleg recording collectors will remember that Italy was the source of many "Recordings of Indeterminate Origin". IIRC the law was that the bootleg producer would open up a bank account and deposit a small royalty for each copy produced. The money was made available to the artist to claim (thus legitimizing the bootleg).

Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins!

[ResidntGeek]

You can settle this once and for all. Smart guy like you, I'm sure you have a bitching sound card and A-D converter (if not, find someone with a Lunatec V3 you can borrow). Get your turntable and your best-sounding record and record it in 24/192 (at which setting even audiophiles can't claim to hear the difference), then downsample, upsample back to 24/192, put them both in audacity, reverse the phase of one, and whatever results is the difference between them. If it's a significant amount of data (personally, I'd be surprised if it were audible), then congratulations! You win, and you can show any doubters exactly what sound is in the "warmth" that CDs can't produce.

Tech Ignorance Breaks The Other Way Once

[Bob9113]

Interesting, so on the tails of 15 years of technically ignorant Internet legislation having unintended consequences prohibiting various legitimate behavior, there is one law that might pass in one country on the face of the Earth where they might accidentally reduce the scope of executive power in a technical field depending on the court's interpretation of "degraded". Fascinating.

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.