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Reactions to Lawrence Lessig in Rome

Nobody expected a full house earlier this March at the Queen’s Hall of the Montecitorio, the Italian Chamber of Deputies, for the symposium, Internet and Freedom - Why we must defend the network.” Usually these events gather no more than 100 participants. Instead: all of the 200 seats were taken and the room was crowded as far as the entrance.

The presence of Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics and professor of law at Harvard Law School, and of Deputies President Gianfranco Fini, called to introduce the discussion, does not sufficiently explain such high interest for this event, held in Rome and organised by Capital Digital in cooperation with Creative Commons and the Nexa Center for Internet and Society in Turin.

Freedom of information is a hot topic in Italy at the moment. The broadcasting monopoly of a group headed by the prime minister is an established fact. Political information talk shows are obscured on state TV before elections. Many people see the web as the only place in the country still open to dialectic information and freedom.

The Italian government is attempting to exercise prior control over web-based content with a law decree, which bears the signature of Paolo Romani, the deputy communications minister for Berlusconi’s government. The decree establishes state control of content on the web. The single user or provider who wants to upload videos to the Internet should apply for a licence from the Ministry of Communication.

Legal consequences? The private citizen is equated with a television channel and has the same obligations: the state may require the removal of content that violates copyright. Mediaset group - controlled by the family of Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi - sued Youtube for copyright infringement in 2006. The Romani Decree provides the Berlusconi group the positive outcome of this lawsuit.

Will the governing majority fully support the Romani Decree?

The participants at the conference were also waiting for an answer to this question from No. 2 of the majority party, Gianfranco Fini. His words were indeed striking. The third-highest figure in Italian institutions supported the candidature of the World Wide Web for the Nobel Peace Award and declared that Internet should be considered “a real fundamental right” of man and should be protected as a “means of freedom through which each of us not only expresses himself but can control the efficiency of public administration and institutions, opening a new relationship between citizens and public power.”

In a clear reference to his own government coalition, Fini called for politicians “to look ahead instead of looking in the rear-view mirror,” recognising the ability of Internet self-regulation. Lessig’s talk was particularly relevant to the Italian situation. The founder of Creative Commons described the web “a battlefield” where critical issues affecting society and business take place simultaneously. It’s where a strong clash between generations occurs. Lessig called for an approach free of extremism and opportunism, one that does not criminalise the tool of modern communication or close its eyes to the economic, social and legislative requirements that it raises. He spoke of the need for a “regulatory humility” rather than “fighting a hopeless war” with a regulatory obsession that eventually can only “corrode and corrupt democracy.”

The state should not indulge in making laws for us, Lessig concluded. Rather, the powers of society and industry must care for the very people who it now criminalises and who are the only ones able to make the Internet “an instrument capable of generating unexpected and unknown innovations.”

Such a place is a parallel universe to that where Paolo Romani lives. When asked about the “Vividown” sentence (three executives from Google Italy condemned for defamation and invasion of privacy for publishing a video in which a disabled child was beaten by schoolmates), the deputy minister of communications reaffirmed the government’s will “to give Google the responsibility for all that transits on its video-sharing portal.”

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Flickr images from Capitale Digitale

Tags: creative commons, gianfranco fini, google italy, italy, law, lawrence lessig, mediaset, paolo romani, regulation, rome, safra foundation center for ethics, youtube,

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