Italian Law Changed By The Hackaday Prize

A recent change in Italian law was spurred by the Hackaday Prize. The old law restricted non-Italian companies from hosting contests in the country. With the update Italian citizens are now welcome to compete for the 2015 Hackaday Prize which will award $500,000 in prizes.

We’ve heard very few complaints about the Hackaday Prize. When we do, it’s almost always because there are some countries excluded from participation. We’ve tried very hard to include as much of the globe as possible, some countries simply must be excluded due to local laws regarding contests. The folks from Make in Italy saw last year’s offer of a Trip into Space or $196,418 and set out to get the local laws changed (translated). Happily they succeeded!

The Make in Italy Foundation was started to encourage and support FabLabs in Italy. After seeing two major Hacker and Maker oriented contests — The 2014 Hackaday Prize and the Intel Make it Wearable contest — exclude Italian citizens from entering. Their two prong approach sought out legal counsel and started a petition on Change.org signed by about 1.8k supporters.

We’ve been holding off on the announcement as we needed our own legal opinion on the change (we’re not great at understanding Italian legal PDFs without some help). But today we have removed Italy from the list of excluded countries. Submit your entry today just by writing down your idea of a build which will solve a problem faced by a large number of people. Build something that matters and you could win a Trip into Space, $100,000 for the ‘Best Product’, or hundreds of other prizes. But we’re not waiting until the end, over the next 17 weeks we’ll be giving out $50k in prizes to hundreds of entries.

[Thanks Alessandro]


The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

29 thoughts on “Italian Law Changed By The Hackaday Prize

  1. It’s a hacking contest. Entrants from companies with dumb laws should be able to figure out how to hack around them to enter competitions hosted outside their country!

        1. I’m not far from San Marino Republic so I was already thinking about posting stuff from there :)
          As Mikes told us few comments above it’s an hacking contest ! I’m supposed to hack around to be here.

  2. “We’ve heard very few complaints about the Hackaday Prize.”

    Really? Man, I am sick and tired of these perpetual contests that take up the time and space that used to be devoted to real hacks. Yes some contest entries are quite interesting. But they deserve a post – then move along already. You milk it for months on end just to blow your own horn HaD.

      1. I am still here because I care. I have been a HaD site fan since the start, and I have remained so through good and bad times. I’ll leave it to you to decide if these are good times or not.

        1. This was posted 28th, the previous on the 24th. 2 posts a week to encourage people to create new content is a good thing. You can run s script to hide the posts, but I can’t avoid the complaining. Can you please put #negativity at the beginning of your comments in future.

    1. Oh shut up. Even as a griefer/complainer/troll/whiner I find your post annoying. Hackaday Prize breathed life in to this website. Some of the projects that were born from it were seriously cool and beat the hell out of the millions of “Art student connects coffee mug to Arduino Uno with 4-12 jumper wires”/”overclocking raspberry pi using DIAMOND!1″/”circuit-bending” level crap that was prolific on here between 2008-2014. New management has really spruced this place up! …So: put a sock in it!

      I STILL don’t like the mobile friendly web 3.0 aesthetics, but the hackaday.io / hackaday prize more than make up for it.

  3. I think the title is perhaps a bit self centered. It wasn’t HAD Prize that changed the law, it was a bunch of hackers in Italy who changed the law; inspired, but in no way associated with HAD. That is a very big difference. If I weren’t already aware of this from reading a previous post, I would have interpreted the title is suggesting that HAD had done this.

    This is one of the most significant achievements I’ve seen on HAD (changing laws > building robots), and I think it’s important to ensure the credit is _very_ clearly pointed in the right direction.

    Congratulations to Make in Italy Foundation. This is no mean feat you have accomplished!

  4. Those saying there was no change, follow the link and read the details. the law did provide an exclusion which should have applied, but in the past it had been enforced beyond the letter of the law. This has now been changed.

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