Former Italian Welfare Minister Roberto Maroni joyfully declared he illegally downloads copyrighted music from the Internet. Of course this shaked the parliament and the music industry. Several Members of Parliament declared music should be sold at lower prices and taxation. A few of them even admitted they download illegally as well. It’s ironic our severe legislation against p2p has been approved by the former government, the same where Maroni was Minister, but then again…

I think it was quite some time this topic needed a serious discussion. There are sovereign states where privately exchanging copyrighted material without profit is considered legal (fair use) and legislations (e.g. in US) where copyright is just an temporary monopoly granted by the State for the sake of the public good, not a human right. I agree we need to remunerate artists to guarantee healthy culture production environment, but in the Internet era do we still need the music industry? For the sake of our society, don’t we have any better way of producing culture and entertainment?

Recently I’ve had the possibility to buy music directly from the artist (Mayday) and paid just €5 for a good quality CD (btw: thanks guys, your music is great!). How come an independent artist can produce a few hundreds CDs and sell them at €5 while record labels produce same quality in zillion of pieces (at much lower costs) and sell it at €20? Do they waste most of that money in advertising? Or do they make unreasonable margins?

Anyway the most interesting comment came from Bobo Craxy, son of former prime minister Bettino. He said downloading music from the Internet is stealing. Well, his family certainly knows what qualifies as stealing and what not.