Italian Government Commision on E-content wrote a report copying (without citation nor permission) a sentence about CopyLeft, thus violating Copyright.

San Remo is the most known Italian Music Festival. Millions of people watching TV these days. So 3 Italian Ministers had the good idea to show off in TV signing an agreement against piracy and for protecting music authors; in reality it just defends big Music Labels and not citizens. Anyway this is normal: we have a media govern, they govern via television.
What is more interesting is that the Ministry for Innovation and Technologies released a report about Digital Rights Management (2.9 Mb Pdf file in Italian). I come to know via an article by Emanuele Somma (you can try the automatic translation in English if you don’t master Italian) that this report, besides being full of errors, also stole a sentence about Copyleft from the magazine “Il Mucchio Selvaggio”, n. 526, march 2003, precisely from an article titled “Il copyleft spiegato ai bambini” (copyleft explained to children) written by Wu Ming Foundation. Of course they didn’t cite the original article. So here we are at the incredible paradox: the government commision, that wants to regulate e-content, copies the copyright-protected e-content of someone else without even citying it!!!
Moreover the sentence contains a lot of errors and it is not at all precise. They copied and they copied from a wrong report! Geniuses! They also refused to hear the Free Software Foundation (there was no time!), while they were happy to listen all the Music Labels lobbyists.
The copied sencence is:
“Si è andata affermando negli ultimi anni la filosofia del Copyleft. Il termine (denso gioco di parole intraducibile in italiano) si traduce in diversi tipi di licenze commerciali, la prima delle quali è stata la GPL- GNU Public License ([in nota] La licenza GNU/GPL è stata realizzata dalla Free Software Foundation), nata per tutelare quest’ultimo e impedire che le grandi case di software si impadronissero, privatizzandoli, dei risultati del lavoro di libere comunità di utenti. Il software libero è a «codice-sorgente aperto», il che lo rende potenzialmente controllabile, modificabile e migliorabile dall’utente, da solo o in collaborazione con altri.”
You can find all the articles that use the copied sentence by searching in Google for “denso gioco di parole intraducibile in italiano” (that means “pun overloaded of meanings, untranslatable in Italian”). The first article is the original, the last one is the goverment’s one shamelessy stealing the sentence. The copied sentence is at page 81 of the Commission report.
Just to let you know: based on current law, in Italy, someone caught downloading copyright material off the Internet could go to jail.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *