On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 02:52:52PM +0200, Alessandro Rubini wrote:
No, it's a different issue. Some time ago (one, two months, I don't remember), a law was approved that requires any "periodical delivery of information on any media" to be registered at the local police department. Worse, it required that any such periodical source of information has an official editor that is part of the journalist's association (something acting like a mafia of information, not an association anyone can subscribe to).
law 62/2001 (7 may) ;) www.interlex.it/testi/l01_62.htm in italian unfortunately
After a lot of complaints and some digging in the issue, it looks like the authors of this law didn't think about web sites. So, once again, we have a law that may make everyone a criminal, or it may not. Our political class is absolutely ignorant about technology and information flow (there may be some exceptions, but I could make this assertion in public: we have several such gross errors to support the idea). Also, when we met in Roma with a SIAE officer and the politician the wrote the SIAE law, they demonstrated to absolutely ignore about what free software is and what programmer wants. They still think that a real programmer is one who hopes to become as rich as Bill Gates (we heard "SIAE is there to protect you, in the hope that someone of you will become a new Bill Gates due to his inventiveness").
What you say is only partly true, since it's true that it's another law that can be quite subject to interpretation, but I'm pretty sure that the purposed ruleset for the practical application of the law supports early criticism which defined this law the murder of frre information in Italy. I have not the Punto Informatico and Interlex article about me ;) but I know that Abruzzo (Journalist Order leader in Italy) was very happy with the ruleset, true since the beginning of the discussion of this law to his position of defining this law right and just :( Seems like he worked a lot to further his journalism lobby's interest :((