If this law goes into effect, site owners will be required to either remove or post corrections to previously posted informations within 48 hours of receiving a request by an allegedly defamed person or company. Corrections will have to be posted with the same visibility as the offending text, no commentary whatsoever and no regard as to whether the corrected information, or the correction, is true or not.

And without a court order.

Under penalty of a fine of up to € 12000.

Not sure how this will affect WP given that it's all hosted in the U.S. including the italian one (right?), but I believe the italian editors might fear to be held responsible individually.

However it does certanly makes scary running a blog, not to mention an online newspaper, as an italian citizen.

Be wary in drawing clear distinctions between scientists and bureaucrats, because figures such as presidents or directors of scientific institutions, here in Italy, are usually more bureaucrats or politicians than scientists, and their actions or statements might not be motivated by science alone.

So while it might be fun to imagine us italians running with our pitchforks after a bunch of lab-rats to burn them at the stake for their failure at quake-prediction, what's really happening is that a prosecutor has doubts about the “quality” of work of some people paid lotsa public money to be part of a committee whose task was to assess seismic risks for that area at that time. Was the risk assessed correctly or not?

And if not, why?

Note how (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100622/full/465992a.html) nobody is willing to take responsibility for the reassuring statements that in the end convinced the otherwise alarmed population to stay at home. The scientists say that the meeting was too short to consider all the data, while the civil protection agency responds to them that they should have not waited six months to object to that.

An aside: back in 2009, before and after the quake, there was one guy claiming to be able to foresee when and where earthquakes would strike with a certain precision by measuring radon emissions. Except the quake he foresaw a week earlier nearby L'Aquila never happened, and after the big one caused 300 deaths, he went on record saying to have foreseen it by something like 6 to 24 hours, depending on which interview. He became somewhat popular at the time, and probably still is, to the point that the public opinion might be left with the notion that quakes can indeed be foreseen - this trial might not be that bad thing for science after all.