A proposed law in Spain (Ley de los Servicios de la Sociedad de la InformaciĆ³n, LSSI) would allow the goverment to censor content in Internet (without asking a judge) and require registration prior to publication, [...]
I've heard that there are similar laws in France and Italy (is this the same as the one forcing sottware distribution media to bear goverment produced identification labels?).
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).
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").
To be fair, the law about information was not limited to those stupid rules about periodical news; it's mainly a law about government helps to new publishers, but they manage to put that nonsense in it, and now it is effective (even though not applied to the letter).
The report suggests that the draft will make it illegal even to link to so-called "hacking tools" - presumably[1] this would include port scanners, packet sniffers, vulnerability scanners and the like which have perfectly legitimate uses for network administrators and programmers.
I think we have something like that about child-porn. Once again, the law is meant to prohibit newspapers that invite readers to look at child-porn stuff, but the letter of the law can well be applied to web sites (and it also tells about links-to-links, so everyone is illegal).
IANAL (i am not a lawyer) INCCUL (io non capisco, consultate un legale)
I'm also wondering about an idea to do a web page linking to all the Bad Laws related to computers and networking, that are being rushed through all over the world.
Good Idea. Any volunteer?
/alessandro
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 :((