Your Blogging Licence
It's one of those cute (well, the first couple of times you see it) neologisms seen around the place sometimes. Someone makes a mistake on a blog and there are cries of !"You'll get your blogging licence revoked you know!". Perhaps for the crimes of not cat blogging on a friday, or something more serious like not referring to the internet as "teh intertubes".
The point being, of course, that no licence is required. Although, thanks to two quite entirely insane (in my ever so humble opinion) Italian politicians, that might not continue to be the case:
The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.
...
The Levi-Prodi law obliges anyone who has a website or a blog to get a publishing company and to have a journalist who is on the register of professionals as the responsible director.
Can you actually imagine this? The idiocy behind this is simply stunning. That every blog must be registered? That someone on the register of journalists (what is a register of journalists anyway?) must be involved? Can anyone seriously believe that this is being proposed in a Western Democracy?
If this actually happens I can tell you what will come next though. It's not all that tough to write a script that will generate a blog for you, nor would it be to get another to fill in the relevant forms. The office doing the registration will be inundated with applications, millions upon millions of them. If this goes through then I think the Italian State is going to find out about Slashdot and what a few tens of thousands of enraged geeks can do to you.
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Mark Sparrow
October 22nd, 2007 4:57pmIn some European countries you do have to be registered in order to call yourself a journalist. There's no tradition of amateurism in some societies. That's why much of continental Europe has a stultified and compliant press.