Consumer associations, service providers, researchers and legal experts have sent an open letter to the Italian Minister of Culture, asking to reconsider the composition of the Committee that has been created "against digital and multimedia piracy" – probably heading towards an Italian edition of the "Sarkozy doctrine". [via GBLOG]

Along the lines of Lawrence Lessig’s article on the Wall Street Journal, special attention is suggested in dealing with the complex way in which culture is nurtured by the ability to manipulate existing content to create new entities.

Lessig’s article, far from being a "Defense of Piracy" (Luca De Biase points out that the title is not the one Lessig would have chosen), is a call for a more reasonable approach in protecting authors’ rights:

The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it
difficult, sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that
any free society […] would
allow to exist, legally.

The most fascinating and thought-provoking section is perhaps the one where he puts the current "copyright war" in historical perspective, showing the 20th century as an anomaly, characterized by an overblown role played by cultural mass consumption and juxtaposed with previous and – not so difficult to foresee – forthcoming relevance of amateurish creativity in cultural production.