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The Swedish Royal Library, which has also stores everything published in Sweden (since 1640) has been archiving all swedish web pages. (since 1996, I think)

There was a small flap about this recently, due to new data privacy legislation. They workaround is that the material is not available on the web, but can be accessed at the library.

Which is of course, a bit silly given things like the wayback machine, which are located in foreign countries where EU privacy directives don't matter.

Just wanted to point out that this is already happening in sweden since a few years back, 1994 I think. The Royal Library of Sweden is constantly archiving the swedish part of the internet, which afaik covers the .se tld.

Just a little side note here...
There is an ongoing project in Sweden (swedish), and also one in the U.S.A dedicated to preserving the type of information which would earlier typically have been printed.
Which I guess is the information we really want to preserve; the 1.2 million geocities homepages are probably not going to be of particularly large relevance to people in the year 2200.

The contents downloaded will be saved as a "cultural heritage", and will most likely be held private by the researchers until copyright has expired. Yes, in the future, people will look at your crummy homepage and see what people thought at that time!

You can find out more at http://kulturarw3.kb.se/html/projectdescription.ht ml.

The corresponding Swedish project gathers everything they can, and not only Swedish sites but foreign sites which are about Sweden or by Swedes -- provided they can be found. (This is the same institution which keeps a copy of everything which is printed in more than 20 copies in Sweden.)
Throwing stuff away because "it's not interesting" is a bad strategy, as we've found out 100 years later. Is there an Australian institution which keeps everything which is printed in Australia for posterity? If not, that might explain why the strategy is like it is.

I'm somewhat confused by the situation. While it's true that mere collections of information probably aren't what the legislators had in mind when copyright was established, they may still represent an essential investment to the compiler - not in storage costs, but in the effort needed to collect the data in the first place.

The Swedish Copyright Act has for quite some time contained a special kind of protection for collections of large numbers of information items (Article 49), similar to the protections given to audio or video recordings. It differs from normal copyright in a number of ways:

• There is no requirement of artistic creativity, i.e. the collection need not be devised or expressed in any novel way.
• The compiler enjoys only financial rights, but not any moral rights similar to those awarded to authors of literary or artistic works.
• The duration of this protection is based on when the compilation was created, rather than on when the compiler died.
• The duration of said protection is much shorter than that given to literary or artistic works, today 15 years after the compilation was created as compared to 70 years after the author of a book died.
• In addition to enjoying this simple kind of protection, a collection that has literary or artistic merit may enjoy normal copyright protection as well (imagine a telephone directory decorated with flower ornaments between every five subscribers).

As with books, general provisions for fair use, private copying etc. apply, and as with books, nobody is prevented from extracting individual items of information from the collection, as long as you don't simply copy the entire collection.

These provisions predate the appearance of computerized databases, and were appearantly intended for printed catalogues, directories and the like. However, I think they apply equally well to digital collections, and I'm not aware of any legal major disputes over this matter in Sweden.

Then we started hearing complaints from several other countries that databases weren't protected by copyright, that such protection had to be established, and that it must be international. Funny they didn't seem to notice that Sweden already had that kind of protection, but went ahead outlining that protection from scratch. Then we were essentially required to adopt whatever they came up with, so now we have two kinds of protection covering approximately the same thing, but with very different rules.

Now I hear that the USA still has no database protection at all - and I was under the impression that the USA was the place where these desperate cries for database protection originated. Was I wrong? How many different kinds of database protection will be imposed on smaller countries before the USA gets its act together and implements even one of those, wreaking havoc with existing legal concepts everywhere?

What does the Berne Convention have to say about encouraging copyright violation? That is probably the relevant law in this case.

While I don't know the text of the Berne Convention by heart, I'd say it's only marginally relevant (legally speaking, it's not a law, by the way). The Berne Convention sets some minimum standards for copyright, but its primary purpose is to let foreign authors enjoy the same rights as the nationals of the country where copyright is claimed.

Before the Berne Convention was established in the late 19th century, a Swedish publisher could obtain a book by a British author, possibly translate it, and distribute as many copies he liked within Sweden, without the British author getting a say (or even receiving a penny in compensation)! Even today, copyright legislation is essentially national, with various conventions extending the rights given by national laws also to foreigners.

I don't think the Berne Convention says much about encouraging infringement or similar "side issues". The function of the Berne Convention (or perhaps some other convention) in this particular case was essentially to allow the recording industry to bring charges to the Swedish teenager on behalf of foreign musicians. The rest was up to the Swedish court to decide in accordance with the Swedish Copyright Act and other relevant statutes.

There is another potential twist related to the Berne Convention though: I don't know from what country the actual MP3 files were (and maybe still are) served. In this layman's opinion, charging somebody with assisting infringement by linking to those files will require their distribution to be illegal in the first place. What if they reside on a server in a country which isn't party to the relevant conventions, or where even domestic copyright law is insufficient? Can you be charged with helping someone abroad to commit an act that would be illegal if committed in your own country, but not where it's actually committed?

Note that making a single copy for your own personal use normally isn't illegal in Sweden, so I don't think you'll get anywhere by claiming the teenager was assisting those who downloaded the music to commit "petty theft of intellectual property" or something. The issue here is whether he in effect operated as the advertising agency of an actual pirate (something the court appearantly didn't address, due to sloppy homework on the part of the prosecutor).