The resounding defeat of the 5 Stars (and of the League) in the European Parliament in the vote on copyright protection can make us breathe a sigh of relief for the narrow escape, but it must not make us lower our guard against the repeated liberticidal intentions of freedom of the press vigorously expressed by Di Maio, by the undersecretary for information Crimi and by other parrots of the yellow-green alliance.
The European Parliament, with an overwhelming majority, has put an end to a battle that the giants of the internet, with the help of the grillini, have been fighting for several years. It's passed the legislation on the protection of copyright which obliges internet giants to pay for the publication of articles, films or other content produced by publishing houses, and reported on their sites. Until now , many internet giants reproduced newspaper content or TV clips for free without paying anything to their authors . In this way there is a risk of aggravating the crisis of information producers whose elaboration costs or is the result of artistic creativity, which as such must receive a fee if it is published by a different publisher (such as the Internet one) who, by assembling the contents for free others from it to a profit, often even of a considerable amount.
The question is certainly delicate. We should therefore not be surprised if the debate around these issues lasted a few years and how tiring it was to draw up a bill that would combine the defense of freedom of expression with the rights of authors in a framework of strengthening the principles of democracy. The solution found looks like a correct step towards a balanced regulation of the potential of the web without trampling on the individual rights of authors and publishing companies.
The affirmation of many 5 Star executives according to which regulating the network means gagging its potential and therefore reducing the rate of democracy of the people are false and seriously misleading. Democracy defends itself only if the rights of individuals or certain economic subjects are not trampled on in the name of an indistinct "people" whose possibilities of free expression are not touched at all, on the contrary, they could possibly be valorised if placed in contact with an environment capable of giving a fair reward to individual abilities. Capabilities that are actually mortified or coerced if they are channeled in a forced and unguaranteed way, through tools such as the Rousseau platform, which offer no guarantee of transparency.
Of course, it will not be from these new regulations that traditional newspapers will be able to receive guarantees about their future. If people buy fewer and fewer newspapers or if generalist TVs suffer, it's not just Google's fault. Publishers and journalists will have to begin to ask themselves if they are truly credible and if their products are sufficiently attractive to people ever more busy with a thousand occupations and deprived of the necessary cultural tools to understand many problems of the modern world.
But this does not remove the reasons for concern for the positions of Di Maio towards free information continue to be more than founded. There threatens to remove state-owned company ads from newspapers that “speak badly about the government” it is dangerous precisely for freedom and democracy. Nothing prevents ministers and parliamentarians from criticizing journalists and pointing out their mistakes. On the contrary, this would stimulate the category to better prepare themselves when interviews are carried out or when articles are written which report the thoughts of this or that politician. But this is precisely what Di Maio and his associates do not want: woe to be faced with trained journalists!
Much better intimidate individuals and threaten publishers (which in truth in Italy are not exactly pure) to enslave information and transform it into a propaganda tool, than working for the affirmation of information that is truly free from any conditioning and capable of carrying out the role of power controller for which it was born. Is this the government of change? That is, the overcoming of the current situation, certainly not perfect, with the return to the obscurantism of the darkest decades of the past century? Watch out for warning signs. The storm is often heralded by the dull rumble of distant thunder. But the shrewd wayfarer manages to evaluate them in time and find suitable shelters.
