[Foundation-l] keep watching the Italian government

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2007/10/19, Gianluigi Gamba <gigamb at tin.it>:
> Hi everybody,
>
> the Italian government has advanced a proposal for a law that - if
> approved by the Parliament - will oblige all the "publishing
> productions", regardless of the media they use for their diffusion,
> therefore web-based ones included, to be registered into the "registro
> degli operatori della comunicazione" (ROC) - "register of the operator
> of the communications" (such a register nowadays seem to exist in very
> few contries in the world).

Well - slightly similar situation is in Poland. There is no one clear
law in Poland forsing web pages to register, however there is a
combination of press law + one strange judgment of The Highest Court.
According to press law journals and newspapers should register, and
registration process require to select a company or organisation or a
single person to be responsible for content. The Highest Court decided
in one case that a web page which content is changed more then one
time a day should be treated as a daily newspaper, and a webpage which
content is changed more then one time a month is a "journal" :-)
So, it seems that Polish Wikipedia is a newspaper :-)

Fortunately, Polish Wikipedia is not a Polish project from lawyers
point of view. Servers are not on Polish soil and the organisation in
charge of Polish Wikipedia is Wikimedia Foundation from USA.
Therefore, according to Polish law actually Polish Wikipedia is US
newspaper writen in Polish. Polish contributors to Wikipedia are
therefore "Polish journalist working for US newspaper" :-) There is no
law in Poland prohibiting Polish citzens to work for foreing
newspapers. There is no reason to block Polish Wikipedia in Poland.
One can buy frelly in Poland newspapers from all over the world, so
one can also read Wikipedia.

I think the same situation will be in Italy, and you do not need to
worry about it - as long as a Italian parliament issue a law, that it
is forbiden to read and contribute to the web pages which are hosted
abroad :-)


-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html