Nettime - from Franco Berardi Bifo, Marco Jacquemet and Giancarlo Vitali, 
authors of the book TELESTREET: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine 

In June 2002, in Bologna (Italy), OrfeoTV was born and in the following months 
in various Italian cities street televisions were disseminated, giving life to 
the Telestreet network. 

On March 8, 2006, in the city of Padua, where the book was printed for its Italian 
edition, the authors must appear before a judge in order to respond to the 
accusation of defamation leveled by Federico Confalonieri.
As the head of Mediaset, feeling himself defamed by the book and thinking the 
interests of his business gravely wounded (interests that, in the stock market, 
will have supposedly suffered moral and material damage as a
result of the book), Confalonieri asked that the authors of said book be prosecuted 
both criminally and civilly.

The owners of Mediaset and the government, who for years have accused their 
adversaries of using the legal system against them, now turn to the same system 
to ask it to prosecute the freedom of expression. Those who for decades have daily 
gathered together millions of people in front of their uninterrupted emission of 
brain-clogging electronic signals, bring to the courts the authors of a book that 
speaks only of non-regulated imagination. [..]

¶ Thursday, March 02, 2006