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US has much higher taxes,

My national tax rate here* is roughly double what it was in the US. Sweden also has a 25% GST.

it is just that the taxpayers get fewer benefits from those taxes than Swedes get.

That does seem to be the case, yes.

Add up your federal, state and local taxes and see what that gets you.
 

Perhaps having to do all that paperwork makes it seem like more, but it really is not.

The US mail postal service and census doesn't record your address?

AFAIK, the US Postal Service does not. The US Census takes place only once every ten years. In any case, these things are completely irrelevant to the matter of being required by law to register your current address with a central government authority (the Folkbokföring). IIRC, you're obliged to do so within 10 days of moving to a new residence. You are also required to have a national ID card here, and you cannot access any government services without it.

You can't even pick up your mail here if you don't have a national ID card or passport issued by the government of Sweden or another EU or Schengen member state. US passport doesn't count, even with a Swedish-issued visa incorporating your photo attached. In theory, they're not even supposed to deliver mail to you if your name does not appear on the door and it's not a name that's registered to that address, but they do honour "c/o" addresses, and in practise there's some additional slack given in this regard.

The point I'm trying to make is that the national government here knows who and where you are pretty much at all times, and that many if not most Americans who are accustomed to living semi-anonymously/semi-"off-grid" are likely to find this a bit uncomfortable. I know that I did when I first moved here.

*(Yes, "here" now; flew home yesterday.)

[T]he question is what is the difference between a legal search engine and an illegal one under Swedish law.

This is spelled out in the law on electronic commerce and other services: You must take down material that is obviously illegal - as in, when being notified by the rights holder of it being there and given enough information that a reasonable person would conclude that it is clearly illegal. Failing to do that, you must not have intent to distribute illegal material.

Search engines that comply with takedown notices are thus doubly covered - they take down the illegal material, and by doing so proves the absence of intent to serve illegal information.

TPB did neither, and in addition went on record stating that their intent was copyright infringement.

If you can read Swedish, here is Lag (2002:562) om elektronisk handel och andra informationssamhällets tjänster. Check paragraphs 16-19, inclusive.

Also, even though the torrent files are illegal, TPB could have avoided liability by removing them on request.

They could also have avoided liability by not admitting to piracy being their business idea. Hosting infringing content is OK. Not removing infringing content is OK, as long as you can claim to not be purposefully aiding the infringement. For example, by contacting the uploader and then going back to the complainer saying "look guys, you say this is your stuff, but the uploader, Svenne Banan, says it is his stuff. Can you guys settle this, because we'll be in breach of our Service Level Agreement with Mr. Banan if we just delete the torrent."

TPB refused to remove the files and stated that their goal was piracy. This made them liable according to paragraph 18 and 19 of the Law of Electronic Commerce, based on directive 2000/31/EG. (In Swedish: Lag (2002:562) om elektronisk handel och andra informationssamhällets tjänster.)

Actually, a law from 2003 REQUIRES ISPs to delete records when they are no longer in use.

Quoting http://www.notisum.se/rnp/SLS/lag/20030389.htm#K6P6:
â5  Trafikuppgifter som avser anvÃndare som Ãr fysiska personer eller avser abonnenter /.../ skall utplÃ¥nas eller avidentifieras nÃr de inte lÃngre behÃvs fÃr att ÃverfÃra ett elektroniskt meddelande /.../ .â

In English:
â5 Â Traffic information concerning users who are physical persons or subscribers /.../ shall be destroyed or de-identified when they are no longer needed for transferring an electronic message /.../ .â

So according to this, OLDER law, all ISPs who DO save such records are in violation of Swedish law. And as far as I know, the new IPRED law only requires ISPs to provide records that are already saved. Pretty interesting, huh?

Under Swedish law there are no punitive damages.

Pure economic damages (ren förmögenhetsskada) can only be repaid to the actual amount lost. See the law on damages (Skadeståndslagen): http://www.notisum.se/rnp/sls/lag/19720207.HTM

The party that loses the case must also pay for the winner's legal costs.

It will be very interesting to see how the Swedish justice system will handle this. The valuation of the amount lost will be interesting. What is downloaded film or CD worth? Market price? The profit margin? Not much, anyway.

A lot of cases with relatively small amounts changing hands will put a terrible strain upon an already overloaded justice system. Will the society be willing to bear the cost in order to defend copyright? Will it change the law to make defendant's pay the court's costs too?

Downloading copyrighted material is theft under the law.

Helping people to do this is being an accessory to a crime.

Nobody has the legal right to download "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" without paying the copyright holders for it.

>I'm hardly an expert, but a little research suggests that you are wrong.

Then you should read the Swedish copyright law (unless you know Swedish it would be hard though):

http://www.notisum.se/rnp/sls/lag/19600729.HTM

12 is the one making exceptions for copies made for private use. It was also changed last year to tighten what was allowed and what was not. The two changes made was first that the ammount of copies allowed under this was reduced. It is currently "några få" which probably is best translated as "a few". If you read the documents of the passing of the law, this should be read quite narrowly, like perhaps 2 or 3 copies at most. Previously, in part by precedence in the high court, it was a bit more. The other part was the narrowing to "private" use from "personal". Again, one should go to the documentation of the law makers to get the understanding how to interpret it. In the past, again through decisions in the high court of Sweden, it was basically that such copies that could be made and given away to family and closed friends in fact also included people in your class at school and also at work. One wanted to especially limit the work part so that such copies could not be used at work which is the main difference in the going from "personal" to private use. If you do know Swedish, I could give you a link to the 200+ pages document from the law makers that discuss the law in detial, including analysis of the EU directive. It should also be known that those documents, which is basically part of the proposal for the law passed to the "riksdagen", the govermental body elected by the people which passes laws, should be takes as part part, or rather as a guidance, to interpret the law. Courts will look at that doceumntation to understand the reasoning of the law makers.

So no, the law has not removed that possibility, it still exists, you can make a few copies for private use and it includes giving it away to family and close friends (not at work though). There are are some exceptions to this, for example software that is not allowed to copy at all. In addition, one removed a loop hole that basically allowed downloading on P2P networks (since the copy made was in fact for personal use) by adding a requirement that the original of the copies made under this paragraph could not have been made available to the public, or created in violation of 2, which is basically the one giving the copyright holder the excusive right to do so. This makes downloading and making a copy in most cases infringement. ONe could at least not use the "copy for private use" as a valid reason.

>These directives permit a variety of protected uses but none
>of them include giving physical copies of protected works to your friends.

Giving a copy to a family member or a close friend doens't fall under the distribution to the public and hence is not otherwise regulated by the copyright law. If the creation is OK, as it is explaned above, the giving of such a copy to a friend or family is OK which has been decided by the high court (not sure if that is the correct English translation but it is the highest court in Sweden) in Sweden.

>In any case, my impression was that even prior to legislation
>enforcing this directive, the apparent legality of online file
>sharing in certain Scandinavian countries did not extend to
>physical copies of entire protected works.

I think I explained most of it above. The loop hole was that creation of a copy for personal use was allowed. There were no actual requirement on the legalness of the original or in how it was made available to the public. This was added in the latest revision of the copyright law. It is worth notising that there was never any case taken to court actually sayig it was legal to make such personal copies but even the media industry was of the opinion that it would most likely be allowed. This is quite irellevant now with the newly add

BZZT! Wrong!

>In the US, you have Miranda rights,
We got that too... You don't have to say anything when questioned by the Police.

>proper search warrants (that have to be shown to the suspect),
Got that! Read "Rättegångsbalken 28 Kap." http://www.notisum.se/rnp/SLS/LAG/19420740.htm

>standars of admission for evidence (i.e. illegally obtained evidence is not admissible in court)
We have standards and laws regulating collecting evidence. We don't have a law that says that illegaly obtained evidence cannot be used (and franctly, such a law is pretty stupid) but the person collecting the evidence will be prosecuted if they don't follow the rules. It is illegal for the police to set up a victim and such evidence is both illegal and not valid here.

>you name it.
Please do...

>In Sweden? None of these.
As I wrote above, we have all of those you mention, but not exactly the same. Please do some research before you throw away such ignorant comments again. The pirate bay incident have been handled in a way that might be unlawful and that is being investigated by both KU (the Constitutional Committee of the Swedish Riksdag) and JO (The Parliamentary Ombudsmen):
http://www.jo.se/Page.aspx?Language=sv&ObjectClass =DynamX_Document&Id=2002

Most countries require citizenship. I'd imagine that citizenship would at least have some basic language requirements.

No language requirement (suggesting that one should now Swedish to be a citizen is highly politically incorrect), however, you have to have five years of permanent residence and be expected to lead an honest life (or marry a Swede).

http://www.notisum.se/rnp/sls/lag/20010082.htm

Problem is noone is quite sure exactly what they mean by this argument as it was downloaded through an anonymous ftp site publically assessable.

It reminds me of an earlier story about criminal charges filed against Reuters for accessing Intentia's earnings report on the company's own website before it was officially released (by guessing the URL).

That case ended without trial in January 2003 with the prosecutor finding that Intentia had announced the report would be published "around 2pm" rather than "14:00 sharp". Reuters therefore could not know that their successful retrieval of the document about an hour before 14:00 was "unauthorized" by Intentia. Unfortunately, we still don't know whether a more precise announcement would have constituted a legally binding prohibition against Reuters or anybody else attempting to access the file before that time.

However, earlier cases demonstrate that circumvention of a technical access control mechanism is not necessary for "data intrusion" to have been committed according to the language of the Swedish Penal Code. Typical violations of this kind are police officers browsing criminal records they have technical access to, but are not formally authorized to examine (because those records are unrelated to their work). The "data intrusion" statute is only one short article of the entire Penal Code (covering everything from murder and kidnapping to forgery and treason), and it's seldom used when more specific laws apply, but I think it suffers from the same problem of "overbroad applicability" as the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It just hasn't seen that much use in court, even as it has been on the books since the 1970's.

As for Intentia, they (along with two other companies) were given a warning by the Stockholm Stock Exchange disciplinary board for accidentally distributing their earnings report before it became official.

Ummm... Isn't that a crime? At least here in Sweden: A driver that impedes or disturbs another road-user or tram driver unnecessarily, to a greater extent, the traffic on a road, is sentenced to pay fines. (See paragraph 2 - in swedish of course).

It's at least as illegal as making false statements about the product itself (such as selling plain water but labelling it "vodka"). It has nothing whatsoever to do with intellectual property.

I'm not sure though how the Swedish law on the subject relates to dead people. For some reason, celebrities don't seem to pop up in random commercials in Sweden as soon as they are dead, and I think that would count as false marketing anyway. Maybe this is a real problem in Britain?