Italian Parliament To Mistakenly Legalize MP3 P2P 223
plainwhitetoast recommends an article in La Repubblica.it — in Italian, Google translation here. According to Italian lawyer Andrea Monti, an expert on copyright and Internet law, the new Italian copyright law would authorize users to publish and freely share copyrighted music (p2p included). The new law, already approved by both legislative houses, indeed says that one is allowed to publish freely, through the Internet, free of charge, images and music at low resolution or "degraded," for scientific or educational use, and only when such use is not for profit. As Monti says in the interview, those who wrote it didn't realize that the word "degraded" is technical, with a very precise meaning, which includes MP3s, which are compressed with an algorithm that ensures a quality loss. The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.
Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:2)
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Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:4, Funny)
You then get the Vinyl sound from a CD.
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That is just silly.
The only reason some people prefer vinyl over CD is that in many cases vinyl recordings are mastered differently - more dynamics etc, since mostly audiophiles buy them. There is no way that anyone can hear any improvement in actual recording quality in vinyl compared to a CD recording (16 bits per sample, 44100 samples per second). Just because vinyl isn't as easily quantised as digital data doesn't mean that it has infinite resolution.
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Going to a 32bit 48khz sample rate might help a few golden ears, as I understand the CD standard was something of a compromise. Still, you need a reallly good sound system to be able to tell the difference.
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16bit is better than human hearing can resolve. 24bit is enough so that the Brownian motion of air molecules randomly hitting your ear drums becomes higher than the noise floor of the recording. Though admittedly, your heartbeat, the sound of the blood flowing round your body and the background hiss of your nervous system means you will never hear them.
Go in an anechoic chamber one day and you will be surprised how noisy your ears are.
Not that
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It is however possible to capture the 'warmer' sound on CD.
Its got nothing to do with data rates.
Its the physical medium and the processing it goes through.
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:4, Interesting)
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i mean, don't try to pass arguments into a debate about religion
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However, my girlfriend can and has done this and hence she still buys some things on vinyl (despite also owning a hundred cd's). And I had a friend who could see the difference between 60 frames per second and 72 frames per second when we played Doom. To the rest of us both looked glass smooth.
I've known enough people who could hear a difference when I couldn't that I trust that there is a difference.
CD is a smaller subset of data than
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No?
They tell themselves they hear a difference. You're talking to a group of people who buy $400 wooden knobs for their stereo because the wood is supposed to... something or other blah blah blah warmer sounding.
Throwing in words like "subset" incorrectly doesn't make your argument valid. CD and vinyl mastering is done however people want to do it, and they can even be mastered by the sam
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Name the brand of monitor that existed around the same era as DOOM that could actually show 72 full refreshes per second.
Daewoo 15" monitor I used in the late 90's, can't recall the exact model number (Google it yourself, I've long since handed that old monitor on to one of my nieces and don't feel like checking). At 640x480 or lower res, it could do 72Hz refresh. Also, you're assuming GP meant monitors at the time Doom was released, which he clearly did NOT specify, so your whole argument on that subject is pointless to begin with (just covering both bases here). And since refresh rates improve dramatically with lower re
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Jeez, why so emotional over the fact that vinyl sounds better to some people?
Because they don't just say "this sounds better to me", they say "this is better technology", a claim which is at odds with reality, and some people have an emotional response to bullshit.
25mb of data just isn't the same as essentially infinite data on vinyl. Analog is infinitely variable- digital is not.
Analog isn't "infinitely variable", it's just limited by factors that are harder to measure. Instead of nice, solid numbers like "16 bits per sample" and "44,100 samples per second", you have to look at materials, noise levels added by every analog component in the system, etc. But just because those limiting factors are
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you can't because all the technical reasons for why one is better or both are equal is a smoke screen. The real arguments can be boiled down to this:
Simply put, there is nothing that one side could say that would convince the other they are right because it has nothing to do with the tech and everything to do with the vinyl guys thinking the digitals are deaf, and the digitals thinking the vinyls are loons.
Re:Calling all OiNK ex-admins! (Score:5, Informative)
If you do a double blind test with the direct signal from the turntable compared to the same through 16bit 44.1KHz digital ad/da conversion, people cannot tell the difference. In any properly set up and level matched trial. Ever.
The problem is that the vinyl believers cannot accept this, and either will not try it, or do not have the facilities to do a proper test themselves.
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It isn't just that the $50,000 tube amp buying $1000 knob (to make the music "warmer") buying nuts think that digitals are deaf, but that the audiofools, I mean audiophiles refuse any tests. They won't compare the best of digital to the best of whatever they like. Double blind studies with good equipment on both sides *always* finds no difference. Th
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I've made mix CDs for my car. Some of the tunes are 320 bit rate MP3s my daughter got somewhere (don't ask, don't tell) and some are straight bit for bit copies from the CD. It's a good six speaker system, but far from audiophile. And at 55 years old I hardly have "golden ears". But I can hear the difference between the MP3s and the straight CD rips.
Now with your typical two little speakers and a "subwoofer" (we used to have bigger woofers, in fact my
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By the same token, back in the analog days I'd buy an LP and on the first play I'd record it to cassette, and keep the LP as pristine as possible. The cassette's quality wasn't as good as the LP it was recorded from but it was nearly as good, and good enough.
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Whether i read an mp3 from my ipod, my cd player or from a hard drive it's the same mp3, the only difference will be the decoder used.
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well, ask your daughter to do a blind test on you. get some cds, ask her to rip wavs and mp3s with 320b quality. then do a blind test.
really, if you will be able to tell the difference on all of them all the time, you will be a unique person
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In other news (Score:5, Funny)
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The key is to get the Mafia supporting this, so that they can view the RIAA as a threat to the business, and treat 'em accordingly.
mafIAA (Score:5, Funny)
Re:mafIAA (Score:5, Funny)
Re:mafIAA (Score:5, Funny)
Re:mafIAA (Score:4, Funny)
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Yakusa? They make the mafia look like schoolchildren.
M.A.F.I.A. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)
(Music And Film Industry Association of America)
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A italian judge has recently dropped charges against 3 link share websites (Ranging from edonkeyitalia to Bittorrent.com) because linking to copyrighted material is not the same as distributing copyrighted matierial and does not infringe the law. The IFPI immediatly stated that this does not affect end users that are still accountable, and that's partly true: Here the law states that downloading for personal use and without profit is not a felony so you can
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Imagine trash on the streets of Finland or Japan. Hard, isn't it?
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Mistakenly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mistakenly? (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Italy's government
B) The knowledge of 50+ yr old career politicians w/regards to technology
Re:Mistakenly? (Score:5, Funny)
And what about the marketing/mafia/legal knowledge of the NASA technology experts radiating "across the universe" from The Beatles to the whole Universe? I sense a massive URIAA (universal Riaa) and his legal team from Omicron IV to beat the hell out those NASA nerds. Or is it going to be transmitted with DRM? The amount of cease-and-desist-letters rain coming from outer space will make the leonids a picnic. Just imagine, we discover an extraterrestrial life form represented by: their lawyers. We could be starting a war here. The rammifications are endless.
http://gizmodo.com/351542/space-aliens-first-to-get-drm+free-beatles-music [gizmodo.com]
TFA:
You may have heard that at 7pm EST on Feb. 4, NASA plans to blast The Beatles' song "Across the Universe" into deep space in order to serenade otherworldly beings hundreds, thousands or millions of light years away with our very best pop music. I have several problems with this.
For starters, NASA: You got the choice of the entire Beatles catalog, and you pick a song only because it contains a relevant metaphor? I mean, have you ever listened to Revolver? Wait, actually, you clearly must've, since Paul McCartney performed "Good Day Sunshine" in Nov. 2005 for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. If you're aiming at aliens, why not choose something a little less intelligible, like "Dig a Pony," "Come Together" or "Tomorrow Never Knows." If those weren't written for space aliens, I don't know what.
Next on my shitlist: EMI and Apple Corp. WTF???? I've been a lifelong fan of your stupid Fab Four, but you're giving six billion purple globules from the Crab Nebula a shot at digitally retrieving The Beatles before I get one single measly 99-cent download? How is that fair? (Of course, the complete Beatles catalog is already on my iPod, but still!)
And finally, a message to the Crab people: Don't trust these downloads. You'll see the file streaming into your antenna array and you'll be like, "Sweet! Free music!" But then you open the file, and you get this message on your Crab Nebula equivalent of Windows Media Player 11, saying that in order to enjoy this track, you need to get authorization from a central server. You click okay, and the message has to travel back to earth, taking another 50,000 years or so. Which may seem worth the wait, only the track itself expires in 30 days.
So good luck to you, purple Crab people. And GFY, recording industry. You have dissed me for the last time. [Network World via The Inquirer]
Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Funny)
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Is it up to date? Is it progressive VS any other codec out there? Do you need GBs of music to better understand the format, or only maybe one song at every different combinations of encoding?
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Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Informative)
Not when you can accomplish the same thing without violating copyrights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list [wikipedia.org]
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000012.shtml [digitalpreservation.gov]
http://www.id3.org/mp3Frame [id3.org]
http://www.dv.co.yu/mpgscript/mpeghdr.htm [dv.co.yu]
Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
Taking into account the new Italian copyright law, you're actually not violating any copyrights anyway.
Re:Meaning of words (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meaning of words (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but if the word is being used with a different meaning to how it is commonly used, then the law has to define that meaning. Does this law do that?
Also, I don't speak Italian, but as far as English is concerned, it's not merely a "technical" definition, the common meaning of the word "degraded" applies to the MP3 encoding process. The mistake, if any, isn't that the word was used incorrectly, it's that they didn't define the level of degradation necessary.
reminds me of the English non smoking law. (Score:2)
by not defining smoked or lit this law bans things like cheese and fish in a shop that has lights since they can be smoked and are lit.
Definition (Score:5, Interesting)
That would have required that the law exactly defined the meaning "a bassa risoluzione o degradate" (it:low resolution or degraded). See for example how copyright law functions in most countries (except in country that killed their Fair Use like the US) : "fair use" allows you to ignore the interdiction to copy, and then the law usually explain with great details what constitutes faire use and what not (backup, format-shift, quotes/citations, etc...)
It's not the case with the Italian law, it just says "low res or degraded". So normally one would expect to reasonably interpret the law. Now most of the data you find on P2P networks are recompressed, using lossy algorithm. You can mathematically prove in an indisputable way that this step degrades the data by introducing artefacts and approximations (the strategy by which lossy algorithms actually manage to compress data). You can also show that a lot of movie may have a lower resolution (16:9 widescreen 720x576 to square pixel 640x360 is a common conversion, lower PDA- and handheld-console compatible resolution are also found).
Thus how the law will be interpreted is : "lossy MP3, OGG/Vorbis and X264 repacks non-for-profit are OK ; WAVs, FLACs, straigh-ripped 8GB ISO or for profit are NOT".
If the local antenna of MPAA is unhappy, this interpretation will have to be challenged in court and set a precedent. But as I said before, the degradation induced by repacking using lossy compression is mathematically provable and the corporation will have a hard time trying to prove that exchanging MP3 on a P2P network infringes on this law.
Corporation will probably settle for the more easy route exploiting "The Pirate Bay" hole, trying to prove that during the operation some profit was made and thus the sharer are infringing on the "not for profit" part of the law.
Or will push around to force distributors to use copyrighted media into already already converted into lossy format (selling DRMed lossy music files instead of CDs, or moving the DVB-T transmission to MPEG-4/H263 and AVC/H264 so people won't need to recompress from MPEG2), so that either the p2p user will exchange the same files as the copyrighted material (and break the law) or that the p2p users will have to further compress the files (introducing additional degradation and lowering the quality to the point that legally authorised p2p won't be interesting).
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If the local antenna of MPAA is unhappy, this interpretation will have to be challenged in court and set a precedent.
And this is one of the things I hate about politicians.
They have, in their heads, an understanding of what they want the law to mean & how/where it should be applied.... then they generally write the broadest possible language and will actively refuse to narrow it down to whatever their original intentions are.[/pet peeve]
This is the legislative equivalent of "Bank Error In Your Favor", but more often than not, the error constricts the public's actions.
But it's not degraded... (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright law only concerns the source of the copy (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, when some user converts the CD tracks into MP3 and puts them on P2P, and the MP3 found on webstores aren't the same product. At all.
That would be claiming copyright infringement on some picture you took with your camera of some public monument - on the ground that an artist is selling a poster of the same monument and your p
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But which is the more reasonable interpretation of "degraded": a mathematically demonstrable change in the data, or an audibly perceptible change?
If a typical listener cannot distinguish between a CD audio track and a 256kbps MP3 rip of the same track in a blindfold test, can the latter really be con
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In audio and video, especially in pre-processing/recording you record much more information than what's perceptable, gives you more room for editing before artifacting becomes perceptable.
Think of it like amplifying a quiet instrument so you can hear tones that would otherwise be imperceptable, or zooming in on an ima
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Legal actions (Score:4, Insightful)
And what is educational use? I think there is somewhere a law what tells it is for education when it is used on schools or any other official educational usage. But not on personal usage, what would still be illegal.
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Nice... and what if the scientific research requires the use of undegraded (i.e. lossless) source files?
--Rob
Re:Legal actions (Score:4, Funny)
Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
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Makes sense: share MP3, but not WAV from CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
This will keep ordinary people happy in Italy and allow the community sharing that comes naturally, while ensuring that the *ACTUAL* music product of the labels (CDs of uncompressed WAV data) are excluded and therefore protected from sharing, or er
Note that music fans will continue to buy the CDs of the favorite bands regardless of file sharing --- that's what fans do. The sharing is really just free promotion.
Of course, the labels will hate it, but then they hate anything other than open access to peoples' wallets.
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I can't speak for you, but most people I knew ended up buying a lot more CDs when Napster was around than they did after. Download a few songs, realize you like the band / album, then go out and buy it. The people who weren't buying more CDs were the pe
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If someone has created a work of art that is liked enough to become popular culture, and interesting enough that people want to discuss it, why should that mean it is worthless?
It's not as though it's any cheaper to produce just because it's low brow entertainment. Quite the opposite most of the time.
I still think you are being snobbish. Many people spend their entire lives only enjoying art that you might co
Science Project (Score:4, Funny)
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Lost in translation... (Score:5, Informative)
The important caveat is that although the lawyer (Monti) says that this was a mistake, it will not pose too many problems while it gets fixed. He says that while in the mean time, the law be enforced in such a way that only websites that belong to scientific or academic institutions will be allowed to host these mp3s and it will not even cover websites from professors or scientists even if for scientific or teaching purposes. This was said despite the fact that the Italian law allows anyone to make a website that accomplishes the same things (teach or do research or whatever). Monti said that it will be easier to regulate it in this fashion while the bill gets changed.
The previous example cited was kind of butchered from the translation as well. It said that in 2000 another mistake in the use of technical jargon created a law that legalized all pirated satellite TV decoder cards. Although the law was eventually changed, all charges had to be dropped on current pirates of said cards in the mean time.
They expect the same to happen while they fix this new mishap.
Being Italian myself and seeing the current state of the government (what government) I'm not entirely sure that this didn't happen on purpose to allow current charges to be dropped and so on and so forth...Call me paranoid, but if you've lived in Italy as a citizen, then you'll know what I mean.
My two euros.
Higher authorities (Score:5, Insightful)
The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.
...Which will shortly be reversed when higher courts at European level find that such a law in Italy is in conflict with the relevant European directives.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but this will last about as long as the shenanigans in France a few years ago.
Re:Higher authorities (Score:4, Funny)
I thought the Irish had a monopoly on shenanigans? Don't the French have their own silly word?
Right... (Score:2)
Mistakenly? (Score:4, Interesting)
In other related news, Springfield's paper is reporting [sj-r.com] (DOH!) that "Two men were caught Wednesday night with hundreds of DVDs and compact discs, packaged for illegal resale, inside their car... A police report indicated one of the men was arrested; however, a check of jail records showed he was not booked in."
Good thing those guys were just selling 500 bootleg DVDs and 500 bootleg CDs. If they'd ripped them to (degraded) MP3 and posted them for free on the internet, lets do the math here at $100,000.00 per track...
Italy is a latin country (Score:2)
Gladly in Brazil there is not this quality restriction, we are free to share (without any money involved) from user to user.
But people selling those can go to jail (even that I bet no one so far ever did).
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Are we? I didn't know that.
A few years ago there were news of some people that got into legal problem for sharing music, but I've never saw the results.
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http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirataria_moderna [wikipedia.org]
Not even buying pirated material is a crime in brazil, but selling one is. So if you just give way, share with your friends or even put it into the web, it's not crime.
Don't forget even president Lula watched a pirated version of
Which /. editor approved of this? (Score:2)
Did that editor realize he was giving some unwanted a hint?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the day.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Technical or layman definition? (Score:2)
Is it retroactive? (Score:2)
Unless their legal system works differently from ours, new laws are generally not retroactive, so pending cases would be bound by whatever law was in effect at the time the offense was committed. Of course, IANAL.
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But if with a new law something that was illegal becomes legal, then in pending judicial cases defendants are acquitted because "the fact isn't offence anymore".
Tech Ignorance Breaks The Other Way Once (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it serves best as the exception that proves the rule; ignorance in the legislative, executive, and judicial processes tends to lead to oligarchy designed by moneyed (or otherwise potent) special interests.
Too Little Too Late (Score:2)
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I hope he's right!
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I hear you can sue McDonalds for a lot of $$$ if you do that!
Re:This is wonderful (Score:5, Interesting)
If you isten to the KISS vinyl album with the song "Mister Speed" on it (the album cover just says "kiss") you can hear bleedthrough on the master tape on one tune, and if you listen to the first Aerosmith album on vinyl you can hear tape hiss. Pink Floyd fired their first label for that kind of crap!
But if you make a CD of Led Zeppelin's "Presence" or Boston's first vinyl albums with a good enough turntable, your home made CD will have more dynamic range and better frequency response than the store-bought CD.
-mcgrew