Luca Spinelli

Career

Born in Italy, Spinelli started his journalistic career writing for VNU Business Publications and Feltrinelli. Since the 2000s, he has been columnist for the newspaper Punto Informatico. He has written front page news for La Repubblica, La Stampa, Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera, Wired, Il Manifesto and others (paper or online version).

While still a university student, in 2004 he founded Oscon, a legal non-profit and open project that is committed to spreading a free standard contract and provides online legal advising. Up to 2017, the contract has been downloaded more than 220.000 times and it is one of the most used in the country.

Spinelli has conducted investigations witch gave rise to widespread debates. In July 2007, MPs Franco Grillini and Cinzia Dato appended one of Spinelli's investigations about copyright to a parliamentary inquiry towards vice-Prime Minister Francesco Rutelli, promoting a reform of the legislation on copyright. After this investigation, the lack of freedom of panorama in the Italian legal system has been considered a matter of fact and a subject of discussion. In the same year, Spinelli's reporting on a security bill promoted by the Government caused its correction during the Council of Ministers of Italy. In 2008, his investigation on the Government budget revealed the intention to establish public funding for record labels, causing debates with Senator Gabriella Carlucci and the FIMI's president.

The same year, Spinelli wrote an investigation about the national web portal Italia.it, cited by Sergio Rizzo in his bestseller Rapaci (Rizzoli, 2009), in which he criticized the service and revealed the waste of public money. On February 2008 his investigation on a bill by Ricardo Franco Levi led to a wide strike promoted by Beppe Grillo, criticisms by journalists and politicians (Gad Lerner, Vincenzo Vita, Giuseppe Giulietti, Pino Scaccia), and eventually caused the withdrawal of the bill.

Afterwards, Spinelli wrote with lawyer G. Scorza the bill "Give a meaning to the degradation", supported by the MPs Bruno Mellano, Mauro Bulgarelli, Elio Veltri and others. The bill was about a modification of the Italian copyright law and scheduled to be discussed to the Chamber of Deputies, but the fall of the Government halted the process. It was subsequently supported by the Radical Party in the late 2010. The following year, Spinelli's journalistic investigation „La Camera manda avanti il Ddl anti-blog“ was nominated for the 30th Ischia International Journalism Award. In March 2009, he released for first the news of the fall of Swiss into the gray list of tax heavens. and subsequently commented up to now most of the tax treaty between Switzerland and other nations (USA, Mexico, Luxemburg, Denmarx, Noraway, Austria, Netherland, UK, Qatar, Poland, India, Finland...). In 2014 Spinelli worked with the Creative Commons group for the translation into Italian of the Creative Commons 4.0 licenses. In June 2015 he published with Wired a broad investigation about cookie and privacy management laws over the world.

Amongst the Italian expert on accessibility, he was a selected member of the SIE (Italian associate of the International Ergonomics Association), and has been publishing educational articles and essays. He has lectured and provided scientific and legal consulting to the University of Genoa. He is also author of interviews with minister Antonio Di Pietro, scientist Corrado Bohm and activist Ludwig Minelli.