Italian Court OKs Preference for Open Source

Here's a big win for open source: the Italian Constitutional Court has approved a law in Piedmont giving preference to open source, ruling that it is not anti-competitive:

Just over a year ago, the Piedmont Regional Council passed a law which states: "... the Region, in the process of choosing computer programs to acquire, prefers free software and programs whose source code can be inspected by the licensee" (Article 6, paragraph 2).

This choice was welcomed with enthusiasm by Free Software supporters and civil society, while the Presidency of the Italian Council of Minister contested this law, by referring to the Constitutional Court in order to declare it unlawful.

On March the 23rd, 2010, the Court ruled that the preference for Free Software is legitimate and complies with the principle of freedom of competition.

The reasoning given by the Constitutional Court is interesting:

The Court points out: "It is not understandable how the the choice of a Public institution with regard to a feature, and not a product ... can be deemed as a breach of antitrust law”. Furthermore, the Court clarifies that “The concepts of Free Software and software whose code can be inspected do not refer to a particular technology, brand or product, but they rather express a legal feature".

As the Italian Associaation for Free Software notes:

In short, according to the Court, favoring Free Software does not infringe freedom of competition, since software freedom is a general legal feature, and not a technological aspect connected to a specific product or brand. This ruling demonstrates the weakness of the arguments of those who, until now, have opposed the adoption of rules aimed at promoting and favoring Free Software arguing that they conflict with the principle of "technological neutrality".

This is an important result, and not just for Italy: it establishes a line of reasoning that could be applied in other jurisdictions.

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Needlessly Needling Neelie

Predictably, the EU's announcement that it would be conducting an "in-depth investigation into proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle" has led to a certain amount of mouth-frothing from the free-market side. I don't want to comment on that aspect, since it's as much about political viewpoints as economic analysis, and talking about politics always ends in tears. But I'd just like to point out one interesting detail of Neelie Kroes's statement:

“The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open source database company."

What's interesting here is that Kroes is juxtaposing proprietary and open source. Now, for you and me, this is reflexive, but for the EU's Competition Commissioner to be framing an extremely contentious intervention in these terms seems pretty stunning to me. It implies that the difference between those two worlds has been interiorised by at least some senior politicians to such an extent that they are using it as a central part of their analysis in major decisions, *without* feeling the need to justify that approach. Whatever your views on other aspects of the decision, I think Kroes deserves some credit for getting to that point.

More importantly, it basically means we're winning, people.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Epson Joins the IP Bully Club

Sad to see a once-great company joining the IP Bully Club, using dubious logic and bad law in an attempt to shut out competition. Hint: thriving outfits just don't need to adopt such tactics...(via Techdirt).