Italian parlament legalizes P2P

The Italian parliament may have unwittingly legalized sharing music over P2P networks. A new copyright law, passed by both houses of parliament, would allow Italians to freely share music over the Internet as long as it was noncommercial and the music degraded.

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Italian copyright attorney Andrea Monti told Italian paper la Repubblica (Google translation dug up on Slashdot) that whoever authored the law failed to take into account that the word "degraded" has a "very precise meaning." All music sold on the major music download sites is degraded, whether it's a 192kbps MP3 or 128kbps AAC file. Under the new law, music fans would be able to freely share their (not lossless) music libraries over P2P networks.

The law does limit such sharing to "educational or scientific" use, but the effect of the law will be to make prosecuting P2P use more difficult, Monti believes. Despite that, the president of the Italian counterpart to the RIAA told la Repubblica that the law doesn't faze his group because of those limits.

The new law is a another blow to the music industry, which has seen some significant legal setbacks in Europe over the past few months. Earlier this week, the European Court of Justice ruled that ISPs could not divulge the identities of their subscribers in civil copyright cases, just criminal cases. Such cases are increasingly difficult to bring in some EU nations, as German prosecutors have refused to pursue criminal infringement complaints, calling them "petty offenses." A Swiss antipiracy firm dodged this problem by filing criminal copyright infringement cases, then switching to civil actions once the identity of the 'Net user in question was obtained; the Swiss government has now told them to drop this practice.

Should Italian lawmakers decide that their inadvertent decriminalizing of music file-sharing isn't such a good idea, they'll have to pass another law. The legislation they just passed can no longer be altered, needing only publication in the Official Journal before becoming law.

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