Italians give thumbs up to file sharing

ITALY HAS told the music and film industry to go forth and multiply over its recent attempts to put students in prison for file sharing.

According to MSN, The country's top criminal court has ruled that downloading music, movies and software over the Internet isn't a crime if profit wasn't the motivation.

The ruling was made in favour of two former Turin Polytechnic Institute students who set up in 1994 a P2P file-sharing network.

They were found guilty of illegal duplication and given a one-year sentence, which was reduced to three months on appeal.

However the top criminal court in Rome threw out the convictions, ruling that it was not a crime to download computer files from such networks if there was no financial gain.

The ruling does create some strange anomalies in Italy. Breaking copy-protection technologies is still illegal even if downloading the material had been decriminalised.

However P2P supporters say that the ruling marks an important step in that it says that P2P per se is not a illegal.

More here. µ