According to Slashdot, “Italy wants to restrict bloggers’ rights by forcing everyone to register their blogs, pay a tax and have a journalist as a ‘responsible director.’ This law is clearly designed to curb critical voices and free speech, although it has yet to be approved by parliament.”

Yahoo!News reports that “

[a]n ambitious plan to equip Silicon Valley with wireless public broadband services is proceeding with great hopes but many challenges. The Wireless Silicon Valley project was the subject of a presentation at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Expected to cost $100 million to $150 million, Wireless Silicon Valley involves developing an architecture covering 1,500 square miles. It would be used by around 40 cities in Silicon Valley, each of which has contributed $2,500 to seed the effort. While there are no officially defined boundaries, Silicon Valley is generally considered to be a span of California cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.”

Inc.com writes that “[m]oney doesn’t trump independence. At least not for the majority of American entrepreneurs. That was one of several conclusions drawn by a year’s worth of Discover Small Business Watch surveys of 1,000 business owners with five or fewer employees. Sixty-one percent of the small-business owners surveyed said they would not give up the independence of running their own business to make more money working for someone else. At the same time, 46 percent of entrepreneurs said they started their own business to have more freedom or more flexible work schedules, while only 19 percent of respondents admitted starting their own company to earn more. Additionally, about seven of 10 business owners said they do not want to grow their businesses much larger.”

The Guardian reports that “British police have closed down what they claim is one of the world’s largest music piracy websites after a two-year pan-European operation. A series of raids in Middlesbrough and Amsterdam resulted in the arrest of a 24-year-old man and the closure of Oink, a private website that allowed users to locate and download music and other files.”

In a different article on piracy, BBC News writes that “[t]he UK government could legislate to crack down on illegal file-sharers, a senior official has told the BBC’s iPM programme. Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said intellectual property theft would not be tolerated. ‘If we can’t get voluntary arrangements we will legislate,’ he said.”