Appalling Italian law

[Adam Atkinson]

This has nothing to do with encryption, but is a good example of
appalling legislation of the sort we often discuss, so I thought it
might be worth mentioning here.

http://www.senato.it/bgt/ShowDoc.asp?leg=13&id=00007273&tipodoc=Ddlmess&modo=PRODUZIONE

talks about forthcoming Italian web-related legislation.

I've been following discussion of this on an Italian ISP I still use
via telnet and nntp.

General feeling is that, as is traditional with Italian laws, this
thing could be taken to mean almost anything, and it will be used in
Sword of Damocles to threaten more or less anyone.

Basically, web sites (servers? individual documents?) must be
registered as publications, just like magazines (anonymous publishing
is some kind of crime in Italy), and the "editor" becomes legally
responsible as is the case with print journalism. But only people who
are members of a "Union of Journalists" type body can possible
register publications.

It's likely that whoever wrote the law doesn't know the difference
between a server, a hostname and a URL anyway.

NB the law apparently affects anyone "resident" in Italy, even if the
web documents are not hosted in Italy. If I hadn't cancelled my
"residence", I would still be resident in Italy now even though I've
lived in the UK for 6 years.

I may provide more explanation and some comment later if anyone feels
this is of any interest.

-- 
Adam Atkinson (ghira@mistral.co.uk)
"Let's catch that sick bird" he said, illegally.