Italy Vows To Bring Entire Government To Bear To Oppose Croatian 'Prosek' Trademark

from the whining-about-wine dept

We've written a couple of times about the Consorzio di Tutela della Denominazione di Origine Controllata Prosecco, whom I have nicknamed "The Prosecco People" because I'm not typing that every time. This organization with the sole goal of protecting the "Prosecco" name from being used, or nearly used, by anyone else has taken this mission to extreme lengths historically. Serving as examples were such times as The Prosecco People opposing a French company's non-alcoholic sparkling wine brand dubbed "Nosecco", as well as bullying a pet treat company that created a drink for pets called "Pawsecco". In both cases, if you can find any real reason to worry about public confusion as to the source of those goods, you're a crazy person.

But those examples were parodies and puns that at least nodded at the Prosecco product. The latest bullying attempt to protect the Prosecco brand comes from Italian government ministers and targets the EU's consideration for protected status of a Croatian sweet wine called "Prosek."

Italy said on Wednesday it would protest to the European Commission over an attempt by Croatia to get EU-protected label status for a sweet white wine which Rome says has a name that is too similar to its own famed prosecco. Brussels agreed on Tuesday to consider an application by Croatia to have its Prosek wine classified as a recognised protected label (PDO), outraging Italian producers who said the name would create confusion among consumers.

Agriculture Minister Stefano Patuanelli told state broadcaster RAI the whole Italian government would oppose the application "in an adequate and compact way".

The whole Italian government? Dang, I guess Italy is simply not fucking around on this one. Which is a bit silly, actually, as Prosek has nothing to do with Prosecco. While the EU originally did refuse to register the name of Prosek for protected status back in 2013, the fact is that Prosek has been around for literally thousands of years, isn't a sparkling wine, doesn't use the same grapes for production, and there is not a single ounce of shared history when it comes to the origin of each's name. In other words, Prosek is a thing in the world, whether Italy wants it to be or not. In addition, it's worth noting that Prosek is made with red grapes, so even the coloration of the drinks are different.

But, despite all of that, apparently the Prosecco folks in Italy have absolutely lost their minds over this.

Luca Zaia, governor of the northerly Veneto region, which is a major prosecco producer, called Croatia's application "an absolute disgrace" and demanded vigorous opposition from Prime Minister Mario Draghi's government.

"They are stealing an important label from our country, it's as if they wanted to take away Ferrari," he said.

Yeah, not really. There is no stealing here at all. There is only Croatia seeking to get protected status on an age-old wine it has made for a long, long time. In remarks, the EU commission indicated that just because the two types of wine have some similarity in sound, that doesn't mean Prosek can't receive protected status. For that to be denied, there would need to be reasonable concern about customer confusion.

But, as you can see above, very little about Italy's stance on this is reasonable. Nor has been its past bullying over Prosecco.

Filed Under: croatia, geographical indicator, italy, prosecco, prosek, protected status, wine

Italian Public Prosecutor Says Project Gutenberg's Collection Of Public Domain Books Must Be Blocked For Copyright Infringement

from the protecting-the-copyright-of-dante? dept

Back in 2013, we made clear our concerns with the Italian communications watchdog AGCOM setting up new administrative copyright enforcement powers that would allow them to simply up and declare sites to be infringing, at which point ISPs would be ordered to block websites. Soon after that Italy's public prosecutor seemed to decided that part of his job was also to order websites blocked based solely on the public prosecutor's say so.

In the latest such order from the Public Prosecutor's office declaring a list of sites to be infringing, apparently Italy has decided that the famous and wonderful Project Gutenberg website, which is a repository of public domain books, must be blocked. I don't know about the other 27 sites listed in the order, but Project Gutenberg is no piracy site. Yet here it is at number 25 on the list:

They even go to the trouble of looking up the whois info. You would think that maybe someone would recognize that a site founded in 1996 maybe is not a giant piracy site:

The Italian Library Association is asking what the fuck is going on (translation via Google Translate):

As everyone knows, Project Gutenberg promotes the widest dissemination and knowledge of the registered cultural memory. For years it has been hosted by large universities that made their servers available, before becoming an autonomous organization, one of the main of this type and inspiring model for many other similar ones (such as the Manutius Project in Italy), mainly supported by work. of many volunteers. We reiterate that it is one of the most qualified projects on the net, with a large amount of documents accessible for free in compliance with the US Copyright Act, because it is in the USA that it is based: they are works in the public domain, out of rights because they have always been public domain (such as the Bible) or because the maximum terms of duration of copyright have passed.

Seeing the Gutenberg Project linked to a whole series of domains that contain pirated editorial materials for commercial purposes causes bewilderment and disapproval in the world of libraries.

It appears that neither the Italian Public Prosecutor nor the Court even attempted to contact Project Gutenberg which only found out about it after a visitor to the site in Italy made them aware of it:

And, if you want to understand how this happened -- which also might raise some huge questions about how the public prosecutor's office works -- it appears that they were monitoring some Telegram private channels, and saw someone there link to some pirate sites and link to Project Gutenberg, and rather than, you know, investigate, they just decided to ban the entire list. Pretty incredible that they'd look up the whois, but apparently not check out the actual website. Because of copyright, apparently, they must censor all.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, culture, due process, italy, public domain, site blocking, takedowns
Companies: project gutenberg

Permission Culture Gone Mad: Worries About Proper License For 'Balcony Singing' Lead Collection Society To Say It's Okay, You Can Sing

from the copyright-is-broken dept

Yet another reminder that copyright is really, really broken. As you may have seen, there have been a few viral videos making the rounds of people locked down in apartment buildings deciding to hold impromptu music performances from balconies. When the first of these came out, I had joked that it would only be a matter of time until some music collection society called these an unlicensed public performance and demanded royalty payments. Thankfully, that has not happened, though in Spain, a copyright professor did tell a journalist that those singing from the balconies should first get a license (relying on Google translate here...):

Singing songs from the window or the balconies on the terraces, as seen in Spanish houses these days during the confinement due to the coronavirus pandemic, could violate the intellectual property rights of their authors. This is collected by information from Europa Press. In it, Pablo Velasco Quintana, an expert in intellectual property at the CEU San Pablo University, it is necessary to "request authorization" for a "communication to the public", whether or not it is "profitable" , since, according to the law, the author is the only one that it can "authorize or prohibit" "reproduction", "transformation" and "communication".

Thankfully, the Spanish collection society SGAE (which has a bit of a history of corruption) felt the need to come out and clarify that no license was necessary and that it was actually encouraging people to sing in these trying times:

The General Society of Authors and Editors (SGAE) encourages in a statement to the entire population to continue singing from the balconies, from the windows, or from any place where confinement allows it during the state of Alarm to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

"Because singing has no cost, but it is invaluable, especially for those who directly suffer from the virus or for those who fight on the front line against its consequences," he says.

According to the SGAE, the songs that, every night, unite millions of citizens are part of the collective memory of the Spanish and function as a link that reinforces the state of mind.

I'm glad that SGAE seems to recognize that now is not the time to nickel and dime people on lockdown in their homes for entertaining their neighbors with songs -- but just the fact that some experts in the field worried about this possibility, likely means that there were chilling effects from copyright, and some chose to avoid this form of social distance bonding among their neighbors.

While it's good that it's been made clear no license is needed, the fact that people even thought about it is a real condemnation of just how terrible copyright maximalism is. It has infected peoples' brains to the point that they were uncomfortable with the idea of singing in even these conditions, and that's truly messed up.

Filed Under: balcony singing, copyright, italy, licenses, music, public performances, royalties, spain
Companies: sgae

Volunteers 3D-Print Unobtainable $11,000 Valve For $1 To Keep Covid-19 Patients Alive; Original Manufacturer Threatens To Sue

from the patents-are-more-important-than-patients dept

Update: One of the people who helped 3D-print the valve in Brescia says that they didn't receive a legal threat from the original manufacturer, Intersurgical, according to a new report in The Verge. Another person who helped make things happen, Massimo Temporelli, who earlier said they received legal threats for alleged patent infringement, is quoted as saying: "The group we asked for the files refused and said it was illegal". Intersurgical also denies threatening to sue. It states that it could not supply details for the valve because of "medical manufacturing regulations". Another news item says the official list price was not as high as the original Italian report suggested, but without giving a revised figure.

Whatever the details, the episode underlines why the 3D files of these kind of devices should be made available routinely to hospitals. That would allow them print in cases of urgent need, regardless of any claimed patents, so that this kind of situation doesn't arise at all, and lives are not put at risk. Original story follows:

Techdirt has just written about the extraordinary legal action taken against a company producing Covid-19 tests. Sadly, it's not the only example of some individuals putting profits before people. Here's a story from Italy, which is currently seeing more new coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world. Last Thursday, a hospital in Brescia, in the north of Italy, needed supplies of special valves in order to use breathing equipment to help keep Covid-19 patients alive in intensive care (original in Italian). The manufacturer was unable to provide them because of the demand for this particular valve. The Metro site explains what happened next:

With the help of the editor of a local newspaper Giornale di Brescia and tech expert Massimo Temporelli, doctors launched a search for a 3D printer -- a devise that produces three dimensional objects from computer designs.

Word soon reached Fracassi, a pharmaceutical company boss in possession of the coveted machine. He immediately brought his device to the hospital and, in just a few hours, redesigned and then produced the missing piece.

Actually, it wasn't quite as simple as that suggests. Business Insider Italia explains that even though the original manufacturer was unable to supply the part, it refused to share the relevant 3D file with Fracassi to help him print the valve. It even went so far as to threaten him for patent infringement if he tried to do so on his own. Since lives were at stake, he went ahead anyway, creating the 3D file from scratch. According to the Metro article, he produced an initial batch of ten, and then 100 more, all for free. Fracassi admits that his 3D-printed versions might not be very durable or re-usable. But when it's possible to make replacements so cheaply -- each 3D-printed part costs just one euro, or roughly a dollar -- that isn't a problem. At least it wouldn't be, except for that threat of legal action, which is also why Fracassi doesn't dare share his 3D file with other hospitals, despite their desperate need for these valves.

And if you're wondering why the original manufacturer would risk what is bound to be awful publicity for its actions, over something that only costs one euro to make, a detail in the Business Insider Italia article provides an explanation: the official list price for a single valve is 10,000 euros -- about $11,000. This is a perfect example of how granting an intellectual monopoly in the form of a patent allows almost arbitrarily high prices to be charged, and quite legally. That would be bad enough in any situation, but when lives are at stake, and Italian hospitals struggle to buy even basic equipment like face masks, demanding such a sum is even worse. And when a pandemic is raging out of control, for a company to threaten those selflessly trying to save lives in this way is completely beyond the pale.

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Filed Under: 3d printer, italy, threats, ventilators

Italian Spyware Company Execs Arrested After Company Employees Spied On Innocent Citizens

from the power-and-responsibility-once-again-decoupled dept

Any tool that gives people access to tons of personal data will be abused. Law enforcement databases are routinely misused by government employees. Ring -- law enforcement's favorite consumer home product -- collects tons of data about its customers and this data has been inappropriately accessed by Ring employees.

The perfect storm of illicit surveillance and snooping comes from companies that sell spy tools to law enforcement but retain control of the servers where the personal data and communications are stored. An Italian developer, Diego Fasano, followed up his successful medical records app with something far more troubling: law enforcement spyware deployed with the aid of service providers.

The concept behind the company’s product was simple: With the help of Italy’s telecom companies, suspects would be duped into downloading a harmless-seeming app, ostensibly to fix network errors on their phone. The app would also allow Fasano’s company, eSurv, to give law enforcement access to a device’s microphone, camera, stored files and encrypted messages.

Fasano christened the spyware “Exodus.”

The software was popular. Prosecutors all over Italy bought Fasano's product. So did Italy's NSA, L'Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna. There's no telling how much the government slurped from targets' phones over the years, but one prosecutor discovered the truth about eSurv's operations on accident. The information harvested by investigators wasn't walled off from the internet, only accessible by the prosecutor's office. It was accessible to anyone with the right credentials, stored thousands of miles away.

The Naples prosecutor began a more in-depth probe—and found that eSurv had been storing a vast amount of sensitive data, unencrypted, on an Amazon Web Services server in Oregon.

The data included thousands of photos, recordings of conversations, private messages and emails, videos, and other files gathered from hacked phones and computers. In total, there were about 80 terabytes of data on the server—the equivalent of roughly 40,000 hours of HD video.

This meant eSurv employees -- at least the "Black Team" running eSurv's "Exodus" project -- could also access these recordings. There's no evidence (yet) that they did or that this very valuable stash of law enforcement intel was ever exfiltrated by hackers. But the fact remains law enforcement agencies did not have control of their harvested surveillance.

This would have been a tempting stash of personal info for eSurv employees to dip into. But they didn't. They didn't have to because they were already deploying their malware to intercept communications and exfiltrate data from Italian citizens who had been tricked into installing eSurv's malicious, telco-miming apps.

In one instance, the Black Team hacked the phone of a 49-year-old woman from Crotone, a port city on the coast of Calabria, according to the prosecutor’s filings. The team collected the woman’s personal text messages to family and friends, and covertly recorded more than 3,800 audio clips using her mobile phone’s built-in microphone, chronicling the woman’s life and interactions as she went about her daily business, the filings say.

In all, the Black Team spied on more than 230 people who weren’t authorized surveillance targets, according to police documents. Some of the surveillance victims were listed in eSurv’s internal files as “The Volunteers,” suggesting they were unwitting guinea pigs.

A court has already stated the company's product was "designed and intended.. to operate with functions that are very distant from the canons of legality." That should be an indictment of the law enforcement agencies who purchased it as well, but somehow it isn't. The proper paperwork may have been filed and approved by judges, but the spyware relies on cell service providers deceiving customers so malware can be implanted through fake apps.

If the company has abused it tools, it's safe to say some of eSurv's customers have as well. For now, it's only eSurv's principals being investigated. But it does highlight the danger this malware poses, even when it's supposedly only being used for good.

Filed Under: diego fasano, employees, exodus, italy, spyware, surveillance
Companies: esurv

Who Needs Article 13: Italian Court Finds Facebook Liable For Hosting Links

from the seems-like-a-problem dept

As we've noted a few times now, the legacy entertainment business has decided that they no longer support Article 13, because it wasn't draconian enough. But, the real reason for their sudden cold feet was that there were a few indications that some of the European Courts might give them everything they wanted (and more) without even needing Article 13. And, that might just be happening. Recently a court in Italy found Facebook liable for hosting links to infringing content. Eleonora Rosati at IPKat both wrote about this and (thankfully) translated key parts of the ruling, such as the following:

The publication of RTI's audiovisual content through Facebook is an act of communication to a new public in that it is a public other than the one authorized by the claimant. Indeed, the links published through the Facebook page led not to content published by RTI itself through its own platform, but rather content published through a third-party site (YouTube) not authorized by RTI to making available the audiovisual content at issue. It follows that, lacking a specific authorization by RTI, the making available to the public (through a third-party portal) of the intro to animated series 'Kilari' must be considered unlawful.

Got that? This is a case where someone posted links to (likely) infringing videos on YouTube to Facebook. And of all the possible parties liable for infringing content on YouTube... the court agreed that it's Facebook that is liable because a Facebook user posted links to content on YouTube that is likely infringing. And somehow that's Facebook's fault. This is... ludicrous. But, this is also why the legacy entertainment companies are licking their chops over similar bad court rulings in the EU even absent Article 13.

The ruling's problems don't stop there. It does suggest that knowledge of the infringement is necessary, but (unlike the very reasonable -- and only workable -- standard in the US that the knowledge be specific of the infringing work and where it is) decided that no specific details are necessary for Facebook to become liable. As Rosati summarizes:

According to the Rome court... to notify a provider of an infringing activity it is not necessary to submit the relevant URL for each and every infringement.

This, again, is the kind of standard that copyright holders have been drooling over, in part because it makes it literally impossible for platforms to comply and thus leaves them liable to all sorts of lawsuits. And thus, even without Article 13, the EU is already completely screwing up the internet.

Filed Under: article 13, copyright, eu, intermediary liability, italy, links
Companies: facebook, youtube

Italy Tells Rest Of EU To Drop Articles 11 And 13 From The Copyright Directive

from the protect-web-users dept

Italy, which under its previous government had been supporters of Articles 11 and 13 in the EU Copyright Directive, has now made a pretty clear statement that if the country is going to support the latest directive, it needs to protect the users of the web, and the only way to do that is to remove Articles 11 and 13:

"The priority for Italy is the elimination of the link tax and direct or indirect filters on the content uploaded by the users of the platforms, together with an extension of the exceptions to copyright allowing the development of the data economy. Under these conditions, Italy is ready to adhere to a proposal that should come from the Romanian Presidency ".

"We are calling for change at the European level - concludes the Minister - of the famous articles 11 and article 13 of the directive. The network must be kept free and neutral because it is a fundamental infrastructure for the free expression of citizens as well as for the Italian system and for the European Union itself ".

That's a pretty clear and direct statement. Italy is not looking for yet another round of negotiations on this. It thinks that a link tax and mandatory upload filters are clearly bad for the public. Good for them. Of course, getting other countries to agree with them would help.

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, italy

Some EU Nations Still Haven't Implemented The 2013 Marrakesh Treaty For The Blind

from the copyright-trumps-compassion dept

The annals of copyright are littered with acts of extraordinary stupidity and selfishness on the part of the publishers, recording industry and film studios. But few can match the refusal by the publishing industry to make it easier for the blind to gain access to reading material that would otherwise be blocked by copyright laws. Indeed, the fact that it took so long for what came to be known as the Marrakesh Treaty to be adopted is a shameful testimony to the publishing industry's belief that copyright maximalism is more important than the rights of the visually impaired. As James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), wrote in 2013, when the treaty was finally adopted:

It difficult to comprehend why this treaty generated so much opposition from publishers and patent holders, and why it took five years to achieve this result. As we celebrate and savor this moment, we should thank all of those who resisted the constant calls to lower expectations and accept an outcome far less important than what was achieved today.

Even once the treaty was agreed, the publishing industry continued to fight against making it easier for the visually impaired to enjoy better access to books. In 2016, Techdirt reported that the Association of American Publishers was still lobbying to water down the US ratification package. Fortunately, as an international treaty, the Marrakesh Treaty came into force around the world anyway, despite the US foot-dragging.

Thanks to heavy lobbying by the region's publishers, the EU has been just as bad. It only formally ratified the Marrakesh Treaty in October of this year. As an article on the IPKat blog explains, the EU has the authority to sign and ratify treaties on behalf of the EU Member States, but it then requires the treaty to be implemented in national law:

In this case, the EU asked that national legislators reform their domestic copyright law by transposing the 2017/1564 Directive of 13 September 2017. The Directive requires that all necessary national measures be implemented by 12 October 2018. Not all member states complied by this deadline, whereby the EU Commission introduced infringement procedures against them for non-compliance. The list of the non-compliant countries is as follows:

Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Finland, France, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, UK

The IPKat post points out that some of the countries listed there, such as the UK and France, have in fact introduced exceptions to copyright to enable the making of accessible copies to the visually impaired. It's still a bit of mystery why they are on the list:

At the moment, the Commission has not published details regarding the claimed non-compliance by the countries listed. We cannot assume that the non-compliance proceedings were launched because the countries failed to introduce the exceptions in full, because countries can also be sanctioned if the scope of the exception implemented is too broad, so much so that it is disproportionately harmful to the interest of rightsholders. So we will have to wait and see what part of the implementation was deemed not up to scratch by the Commission.

As that indicates, it's possible that some of the countries mentioned are being criticized for non-compliance because they were too generous to the visually impaired. If it turns out that industry lobbyists are behind this, it would be yet another astonishing demonstration of selfishness from publishers whose behavior in connection with the Marrakesh Treaty has been nothing short of disgusting.

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Filed Under: belgium, blind, copyright, eu, finland, france, germany, greece, italy, marrakesh treaty, poland, publishers, uk

EU Copyright Directive Update: Fresh (But Slim) Hope Of Stopping Link Taxes And Upload Filters

from the and-ways-to-make-them-less-awful-if-we-can't dept

The awful EU Copyright Directive is not done and dusted. As Techdirt reported last month, the European Parliament may have failed to do its duty and protect the EU Internet for the region's citizens, but the proposed law has not yet passed. Instead, it has entered the so-called "trilogue" discussions. Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda explains:

In this series of closed-door meetings, the European Parliament and the Council (representing the member state governments) hammer out a final text acceptable to both institutions. It's the last chance to make changes before the Directive gets adopted. Meetings are currently scheduled until Christmas, although whether the process will be concluded by then is up in the air.

A recent decision by the General Court of the European Union has ruled that the European Parliament can no longer deny the public access to trilogue documents (pdf). As a result, Reda has promised to provide updates on what is happening in those hitherto secretive meetings. She just published her report on the second trilogue negotiation, and there's good and bad news. The good news is that a change of government in Italy has led to that country shifting its stance: it is now against the worst parts of the EU Copyright Directive. An EFF post explains the implications of that important development:

There may now be sufficiently large opposition to the articles [11 and 13] to create a blocking minority if they all vote together, but the new bloc has not settled on a united answer. Other countries are suspicious of Italy's no-compromise approach. They want to add extra safeguards to the two articles, not kill them entirely. That includes some of the countries that were originally opposed in May, including Germany.

In other words, there is now at least a slim chance that Article 11 and Article 13 could be dropped entirely, or at least improved in terms of the safeguards they contain. Against that, there is some unexpected bad news, explained here by Reda:

Council, on the other hand, has now completely out of the blue proposed a new Article 17a that says that existing exceptions for education, text and data mining or preservation can only be maintained if they don't contradict the rules of the newly introduced mandatory exceptions. In the case of teaching, this would mean that national teaching exceptions that don't require limiting access to the educational material by using a "secure electronic environment" would no longer apply!

This is outrageous given that the whole stated purpose of the new mandatory exceptions was to make research and education easier, not to erect new barriers. If as a consequence of the new mandatory teaching exception, teaching activities in some countries that have been legal all along would no longer be legal, then the reform would have spectacularly failed at even its most modest goal of facilitating research and education.

Since this is a completely new proposal, it's not clear how the European Parliament will respond. As Reda writes, the European Parliament ought to insist that any copyright exception that is legal under existing EU copyright law remains legal under the new Directive, once passed. Otherwise the exercise of "making copyright fit for the digital age" -- the supposed justification for the new law -- will have been even more of a fiasco than it currently it is.

There are two other pieces of good news. Yet another proposed extension of EU copyright, this time to create a special new form of copyright for sporting events, seems to have zero support among the EU's Member States, and thus is likely to be dropped. Reda also notes that Belgium, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Estonia and the Czech Republic are in favor of expanding the scope of the proposed copyright exception for text and data mining to include businesses. That's something that the AI industry in Europe desperately needs if it is to keep up with the US and China in using massive text and data stores to train AI systems.

The important message to take away here is that the EU Copyright Directive is certainly a potential disaster for the Internet in Europe, but it's not over yet. It's still worth trying to make the politicians understand how harmful it would be in its present form, and to improve the law before it's too late. That's precisely what the EFF is attempting to do with a note that it has sent to every member of the EU bodies negotiating the final text in the trilogue meetings. It has two suggestions, both addressing serious flaws in the current versions. One concerns the fact that there are zero penalties for making false copyright claims that could result in material being filtered by Article 13:

Based on EFF's decades-long experience with notice-and-takedown regimes in the United States, and private copyright filters such as YouTube's ContentID, we know that the low evidentiary standards required for copyright complaints, coupled with the lack of consequences for false copyright claims, are a form of moral hazard that results in illegitimate acts of censorship from both knowing and inadvertent false copyright claims.

The EFF goes on to make several sensible proposals for ways to minimize this problem. The other suggestion concerns Article 11, the so-called "link tax". Here the issue is that the proposed measure is very poorly worded:

The existing Article 11 language does not define when quotation amounts to a use that must be licensed, though proponents have argued that quoting more than a single word requires a license.

Again, the EFF offers concrete suggestions for at least making the law less ambiguous and slightly less harmful. However, as the EFF rightly notes, tinkering with the text of these section is not the right solution:

In closing, we would like to reiterate that the flaws enumerated above are merely those elements of Articles 11 and 13 that are incoherent or not fit for purpose. At root, however, Articles 11 and 13 are bad ideas that have no place in the Directive. Instead of effecting some piecemeal fixes to the most glaring problems in these Articles, the Trilogue take a simpler approach, and cut them from the Directive altogether.

Although that seems a long shot, there is still hope, not least because Italy's reversal of position on parts of the proposed directive makes the arithmetic of the voting considerably less certain than it seemed before. In particular, it's still worth contacting the ministries responsible in EU Member States for copyright matters to explain why Articles 11 and 13 need to go if the Internet in the EU is to thrive.

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Filed Under: article 11, article 13, copyright, education, eu, eu copyright directive, italy, link tax, trilogue, upload filters, user rights

Fan Translator Likely Finds His Work In Official Game Release And Is Totally Cool With It

from the lost-in-translation dept

Fan translations of movies and video games, while wildly popular in many different countries, have also come under recent attack. Claims of copyright infringement have been leveled against many sites and groups that put these translations together, with the theory being that it violates copyright to make works understandable to fans in countries where, often times, a translated version of the work isn't even on offer. If that sounds stupid and protectionist to you, ding ding ding, you're right.

But it's somewhat interesting to see this scenario happen in reverse, and note how different the reaction from fans are when they find their hard work in official releases, without credit. Meet Francesco, an Italian game developer with a particular affinity for a game that I've honestly never heard of.

Francesco, who also goes by Mewster online, is a 25-year-old game developer in Italy. He told Kotaku over Discord private messages that he started translating The World Ends With You when he was sixteen.

"I decided to approach it only because I really loved The World Ends With You and I wanted to keep 'living in its world,' and in the same time, do something to let others who couldn't understand its language play this game," he said. "I found out that I like to translate, and being able to change a word and see the edit 'in real time' on the final game was really satisfying."

And so he completed this labor of love almost entirely solo, with a second person working only on translating the cut scenes. This was purely about his love for the game and making a translated version for other Italians to enjoy. Pretty cool.

Then The World Ends With You got a port for the Nintendo Switch, with an Italian translation being included in the release. Francesco was thrilled and eagerly watched a series of let's-plays to see how his translation compared with the official release. Well, either he did a very, very good job, or the game publisher took silent notice of his work.

It didn't take him long to recognize what he says are undeniable similarities to his own work. Francesco said that some phrases were cleaned up and translated in a different way, but he recognized the majority of the work as identical to his own translations, right down to where the Switch port version had placed line breaks in the word balloons.

Although Francesco hasn't seen the whole game, he said that, "according to what I had seen I could say that 90% of the main story was a possible estimate," in terms of how much of his work he believes they used.

Now let's stipulate the obvious: the title and its story text are protected by copyright by the developer and rightsholder. Were Fransesco to complain, the developer/publisher would likely point that out to everyone paying attention. And they'd be right. But that doesn't remove the moral failure that is using someone's -- a fan's no less -- hard work without bothering to give them an ounce of credit. Were the shoe on the other foot, you can imagine the hell that would be raised.

But for fans? Anger isn't so much a part of the equation.

"The best I could hope for is an official acknowledgement of what happened, but I'm happy just in seeing my translation in the official game," he said. "I hope it will remain in the game after all. It means they liked 90% of my translation."

The question is why more content makers can't take their cue from fans like this and behave just as gratefully for the fans out there translating their works. These are, again, almost always labors of love, not threats to the content creator. So why are fans so much better at being awesome than far too many of the creators they support?

Filed Under: fan translations, fans, italy, mewster, the world ends with you, translations, video games