Italian Wikipedia May Shut Down Due To New Legislation

An anonymous reader writes "Proposed legislation under debate in Italy has Wikipedia warning of a shutdown for the Italian version of the site. They say the law would create 'a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.' They further explain. 'Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge — the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website. Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request the removal of such contents and its permanent replacement with a "corrected" version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources.'"

Re:Berlusconi's a c**t...

[Anonymous Coward]

You misspelled "cunt"

What's happening

[JoshuaZ]

First, Berlusconi and his cronies control the traditional media in Italy. Making something difficult for their competitors is in their direct financial interest. This also works well because a major reason they can stay in power are elderly individuals who don't understand and are scared by all this new-fangled technology. At this point, Berlusconi is clearly one of the most corrupt and incompetent politicians ever in Italy. This whole thing would be funny if not for the fact that this womanizing shmuck is in charge of one of the largest economies in Europe during an ongoing financial crisis. It seems to me that this sort of thing might actually be enough for the sane Italians to wake up and realize how fucked up their government is. Th But so far, they've had a lot of crazy crap and haven't yet done so, and Wikipedia itself is not nearly as popular in Italy as it is in some other languages. (For example, the German Wikipedia is extremely popular in the German speaking world.) So I'm pessimistic.

Re:EU Charter

[hedwards]

It's not as bad as the laws in various parts of Europe that send people to prison for various speech crimes. Germany has it's holocaust denial penalty, and IIRC the UK just sent somebody to prison for trolling.

If those things are permissable under the EU's charter, then I'm not sure I see how this would be any more egregious of a violation.

Re:Berlusconi's a c**t...

[circletimessquare]

Berlusconi è uno sticchiu

fixed it for you

Reporters without Borders

[damburger]

Italy is just maintaining its hard earned reputation as one of the worst place in the EU to be a journalist:

http://en.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/carte-2011.pdf

http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2010,1034.html

Re:Berlusconi's a c**t...

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize that after reading what happens here you may think this is the Banana Republic, but until Mr. B. manages to rip all the laws and the constitution, we still have a decent law corpus (ok, besides the things to go way back to the Duce and the Romans...)

What you describe can happen anytime also in Italy. Laws to protect people from defamation are already in place. The difference is that only a *judge* can force you to take down a page while waiting for a trial.

With this piece of law, you have to do it immediately (48 hours) and publish whatever the offended party send you to publish. As some other pointed out, this is not even to make it simple to take down defamatory articles, is to force people to think twice before even daring to publish something.