Amid concerns from the Web and its leading video sites, Italy’s government is pressing on with plans to extend its existing TV broadcasting regulations to Web sites that host videos.
The draft decree is expected to go into effect this month and would force YouTube and others to operate more like traditional TV broadcasters, marking one of the biggest attempts at controlling and monitoring Web video content by a Western country.
The decree aims to "establish a principle," Paolo Romani, Italy’s deputy minister of communications, told The Wall Street Journal. "If you use copyrighted material, your site becomes an editorial product — a broadcaster that is placed at the same level as other broadcasters."
The proposed rules would include things like gaining permission to use and host copyrighted content even if it is user-created or uploaded; obtaining a broadcasting license from Romani’s office; and accepting legal responsibilities for any content posted to its service.
The Journal
and others warn that this could lead to fines and lawsuits for libel, slander and copyright infringements for materials posted to its site.
The decree comes as a response to a European Commission direction asking countries to bring national regulations in line with current EU norms, hoping to allow for more and easier purchasing of ads and TV and film rights across country lines.
The worry here is that this could set a precedent. The Internet is a very different medium from TV; applying the same regulations and consequences across both feels a bit too heavy-handed. If TV broadcasters run unauthorized content, they are almost always doing it on purpose and pairing it with advertising that brings in a substantial amount of money. Sites like YouTube, on the other hand, aren’t always knowingly infringing because of what users upload, and a vast amount of these videos come with no advertising.
YouTube actually loses money from some of these clips because of the high number of views they generate. |
