Written on August 10, 2008 – 5:43 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
TorrentFreak reports that the PirateBay has been blocked by all major Italian ISP’s who forced to do so due to a court order. The deputy public prosecutor who asked for the PirateBay block is on a mission, as this is his second success in two weeks. He managed to shut down the largest Italian torrent site, Columbo-BT, on July 29th.
The pirates fight back though, they want all Italians to have access to their torrent service. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunder told TorrentFreak that they “are working on setting up a really annoying system for them to filter. “Some of the ISPs decided to nullroute - so we changed IP so it works for them now some other decided to block the domain name so we added labaia.org, which means “the bay” in Italian.”
In a blog post, Sunder calls Italy a “fascist state” predicts that they’ll win the fight: “We have had fights previously in Italy, recently with our successful art installation where we had to storm Fortezza in order to get our art done. And as usual, we won. We will also win this time.”
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 9, 2008 – 6:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Just before the start of a manic football night, I found an interesting blog post by a blogger from the evil side, Italy. Web professional Marco Corsaro wondered whether an “innovative player” was taking advantage of social media to market his services by using the euphoric state Europe is in. People are so sucked up into the game, that they will just participate in anything - as long as it has to do with football. A stupid example: I just dropped by the supermarket where you get a small lion - the Dutch mascot - for every 15 euros you spend.
When Corsaro browsed Facebook to find such an application, he found over 100 applications and probably chose the most logical way to go - number one on the list. It’s developed by the sports TV network Eurosport and Yahoo. This application allows its contestants to compete by predicting the right tournament results. The best will get.. a 42-inch Plasma TV. Corsaro joined the club and says the following:
So whoever thought about this initiative to drive traffic to the Yahoo!-Eurosport joint portal, is also using it as a “teaser” so users install the applications. And looking at the results achieved so far, I’d say, its not bad at all. My rank (I am the last one since I just joined in) is 38.648 out of 60.651 members…that makes me think that about half the people that have installed the application are also actively playing.
Good post mr. Corsaro, I hope your national team won’t play as nice.
Written on February 4, 2008 – 12:03 am
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
Article written by on-line media planner and tech blogger Jerry Houtman
Napster started it, and it has been going on ever since: the fight over online music sharing. Copyright issues are the core of this battle between the music industry and consumers, which recently took a turn for the unexpected. Ars Technica reported on the latest news on this matter, which came from Italy. What’s the story? The Italian government has unintentionally proved a considerable service to everyone who shares music through the Internet. The parliament has, as it happens, adopted a new law on the copyright, which permits Italians to spread and share music on-line, under the condition that they do this is for non-commercial aims and that it concerns music of lower quality. That might not sound as revolutionary as the headline suggests, but it most definitely is, for that second criterion is exactly where the Italian policy makers haven’t done their research all too well on.
According to Andrea Monti, a lawyer specialized in copyright, ‘lower quality’ is a term that can be interpreted very widely. The conversion necessary for sharing makes every music file circulating on the web one of lower quality than the original recording. That permit Italians to distribute music on the Internet without any restrictions. Although the law limits such sharing for scientific or educational aims, Monti believes it will make prosecuting a lot harder. Because let’s be honest: how many of us truly follow these particular rules?
Whereas the French policy makers tried to tackle illegal file sharing with a ban on Internet access, their Italian colleagues have made themselves the laughing stock of Europe by committing an enormous legal blunder. The law cannot be withdrawn or reconsidered, since it has already been approved of and only publication in the Official Journal keeps it from being official. The Italian government thus has to come up with a new law and make it pass through both Houses of Parliament again. It is almost too good to be true, and a small victory for consumers. If only I’d live in Italy.
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