New copyright law allows users to share "degraded" music for "scientific or educational use."
The Italian parliament recently passed a new copyright law that interestingly legalizes the file-sharing of MP3s. It allows individuals to publish and freely share "music at low resolution or degraded for scientific or educational use."
The kicker comes with the use of the word "degraded," for a majority of the music available on P2P and file-sharing networks is in the MP3 format. MP3 is a lossy music compression algorithm which means that all music made available in this format will fall under the category of "degraded."
Andrea Monte, an Italian lawyer and expert on copyright and Internet law, is one of the first lawyers to be assigned to study the law at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. In an interview with la Repubblica (Google translation) he states that "I think it is an oversight due to the fact that the legislature does not know that MP3 fall within the concept of degraded music."
Though the law limits the file-sharing of music to “scientific or educational ” use, there will be more difficulty in prosecuting those who use it for other purposes. The law adds a broad definition of what is considered legal and illegal in this context.
The current law, passed through the Chamber and Senate, needs only to be published in the Official Journal before becoming a fully fledged law. Because of this, the law is no longer able to be edited. In order to correct the mistakes of this legislation, parliament officials will have to pass another law.
Enzo Madda, president of the Federation of Italian Music, says that his group isn’t worried about the new law. "The law does not concern us because we already know how the decree will set the poles (translated)."
"And for educational use will be considered only those sites that deal officially teaching, and academic institutions. Nor sites personal professors."
It may not change much, but at least the Italian people can share music for "educational and scientific use" without having to worry about running afoul of copyright laws.
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We shall see how long this lasts before the law is amended. IFPI will come by and force them to change it.