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Sweden To Outlaw File Sharing, Crypto Breaking?
Martin Kallisti writes "The Swedish Department of Justice has today proposed a bill to be put into effect, if it passes Parliament, on the 1st of January, 2004. It is in accordance to EU directives, but will also criminalize the downloading of material from the Internet without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Furthermore, it will become illegal to break cryptos, circumvent copy protection (mod chips et al), copy books, and as I understand it, use software that is designed to help with any of these tasks, and many other things." An anonymous reader points to an English-language article about this Swedish EUCD proposal, which also mentions a hefty $4 levy on blank digital media such as CD-ROMs.
Well I don't think this will do much. It's like when the US outlawed the selling of Alcohol. People continued to buy it, just illegally. It will be the same here, just with file sharing instead of alcohol.
but will also criminalize the downloading of material from the Internet without the explicit permission of the copyright holder
How do you KNOW if what you're downloading is copyrighted or not and whether or not you have permission. For instance, variouis sites have ripped off Slashdot's icons, which I believe are copyrighted by OSDN and/or Rob Malda.
By accessing the above link, you are downloading copryighted material without the permission of the author.
My journal has hot
Freedom of speech is regarded by European governments as an important component of civil government, but they don't worship at it's throne like US Citizens regard the First Amendment.
It won't prevent pirating, I think the fact that the law doesn't address *use* is a concession to that point. It seems that they rather seek to prevent pirating from becoming a European industry. I think this is analogous to US laws against gambling, where they still exist.
IANAL, but in Texas, the law against playing poker for money actually makes the *house cut* illegal. I think the lawmakers conceded the point that people were still going to play poker, they just wanted to prevent it from becoming an industry.
The best way to do is to be.
Don't pirate anything, AND pay for not pirating anything.
Greedy and ridiculous.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
The EUCD was supposed to be a law in all European Union member countries already by last December. That is after each parliament had two years to pass the law. As far as I know, only two or three EU member nations have modified their laws to comply with the EUCD.
On the other hand, sooner or later the national laws must be passed. I personally wish that at least one EU member would refuse to implement the law so that the issue would be brought back to the EU parliament.
After the fall of Soviet Union, EU became the new safe haven for bureucrates so it's really hard to say how the EUCD situation will develop due to lobbying and politics. What is clear, however, is that most of the national parliaments have not been all that happy with many regulations the EUCD is trying to enforce. I hope that the Swedish parliament will protect its citizens from this legislation that goes way over any reasonable balance.
I have said it in the past and the same logic still pops into my mind.
How can a government body justify making honest people pay for "assumed criminal activity." When do they start adding cost to paper because someone might attempt to use it in counterfeiting?
If it's criminalized to use P2P networks, then it is unfair to charge more for media to "compensate" for criminal acts assumed to be occuring without proof and due process. I can see one act or the other, but not both.
Frankly, the act of purchasing CD media and being charged enormous prices because of assumed criminal use, then it should then be LEGAL for me to put anything on it -- legal or otherwise since I have paid for the right, in advance, to do something illegal. In effect, it's double jeopardy -- punished before the fact and then to be punished again, for the same crime if caught.
I have no idea what recourse EU-folk have against this, but I hope it can be stopped.
Hahahaha .. yeah right. The movie studios and record companies are nowhere near bankrupt yet. Look the bottom line is there is no way to stop file sharing. It's here to stay.
The record labels could have cut the head right off of file sharing years ago by putting their catalog online and letting users pay a reasonable fee ($.50 - $1) to download an MP3. In fact, if they would have done it before MP3 caught on they probably could have introduced their own format with reasonable DRM and that format would have caught on instead of MP3(provided the DRM wasn't too limited). They didn't do that. Instead they continued selling CD's priced between $16 - $20 dollars and it has come back to bit them in the butt. There was, and still is, cleary a demand for cheap music downloads and when the labels themselves wouldn't fill that demand, others did. Digital distrubtion makes complete sense. It's cheaper and the consumers are going to be happier with the product since they can buy the tracks they want and don't have to pay $16 - 20 for 2 tracks they want and 10 tracks they don't.
The record labels are monopolistic and greedy and it's coming back to haunt them. Music piricy will continue to be a massive problem until a low cost alternative (like Apple iTunes) is made available to Windows users. There will still be piricy, and there's nothing the RIAA can do about it, but it will not be near as bad as it is today. If the movie studios and the RIAA think they can elimate piracy they are crazy. Software piricy has always been a problem and now that music and movies can be distributed digitally it will always be a problem for that type of media as well.
Laws, laws, laws. When your business is failing, laws. When your prices are too high, laws. When you're exposed for the fraud you are, laws. Laws are supposed to ensure the safety and security of folks within a society. This round of DMCA-style laws is just the latest in series of laws designed to ensure that the few on top remain on top. Those who enact the strictest and most ridiculous laws simply hasten their own demise. The issue of copyrights will become an election-decider within two to four years. Folks like us who stay informed are the canaries in the mine shaft of laws. When those in charge get out of hand, we're the first to be alarmed, yet no one has taken notice since we started yelling about copyright abuses in 1999. What will make them take notice is when these broad, overbearing laws begin to affect a large portion of the population, thereby ensuring a backlash the likes of which copyright holders can hardly imagine.
I predict, on this day, that within 5 years, we will see the crippling or perhaps even the complete elimination of all copyright, patent, and trademark laws. Things will get worse, much worse, before they get better. But mind you, when things get rough, we must remember to continue getting the word out to the uninformed masses while we wait for our revenge to fully take hold, that it may obliterate the copyright bastards of our time.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Let's not forget that some industries lobbied to have public unregistered access to Xerox machines made illegal.
I'm sure some people saw Gutenberg's printing press as the Big Devil too. And in some ways, it was.
Yes, copying has become easier. Live with it, and rearrange the industries around it, instead of lobbying to pass illogical laws.
Regards,
--
*Art
It's simply not an option having millions of people breaking the law each and every day.
You're absolutely right. Not only is the particular law broken, but Law in general is undermined, as it the citizenry's respect for it and their government.
If "millions" are breaking some law "each and every day", it's a good indication the law is a bad idea, and probably is a law that attempts to contravene human nature.
Better to repeal it, rather than teach "millions" that they are comfortable being causual criminals "each and every day", don't you think?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
It's also ridiculous because 4$ per CD-R? To presume that every CD-R, or anywhere near that, is being used to "pirate" music, not to backup legally owned music, backup other data files, create mixes, to use your mp3-cd player, get a file from one computer to another (what the hell files fit on a 1.4mb floppy disk these days?), and on and on.
This presumption of guilt and preemptive punishment is absurd.
This law would effectively outlaw the Internet, which is based on the premise that it provides an infrastructure for moving data between consenting parties. In its place would be the presumption that moving data is illegal unless proven otherwise.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
You've apparently never heard of Fair Use.
You don't own the bits. You own a license to play the music on the CD, for your own personal use.
If you own the CD, you've already paid for the license to listen to its contents whenever you want, at your leisure.
Since you are legally allowed to make a back-up of said music, downloading an mp3 file someone else made, is the equivalent of skipping that process. You could just as well have a friend come over and rip the cd for you on your pc, the end result is the same. You wind up with a perfectly legal backup copy of a song, for which you've already paid.
As for your last comment, it's quite idiotic, and seems more like a deliberate flaimbate or trolling, so I won't respond to it.
If I OWN something, I can do whatever the fuck I want with it. Period.
If I OWN a system, and forget my password, but can use another system I own to crack it, no law can stipulate that I cannot do that.
-- This sig for rent.
>I don't get it. Don't pirate anything, AND pay for not pirating anything.
The same thing happened in Canada several years ago when a CD levy went on blank CDs--we paid a penalty for the pirating we're not allowed to do. And half the people in my dorm building who hadn't previously used filesharers said, "If we're doing the time, we're entitled to the crime" and started downloading and burning away. I sure did; I was paying a license fee to record my own original music.
I'll say it again: treating your customers like criminals is an unworkable business strategy. And making laws that a majority of your citizens don't think are fair undermines the laws that are fair.
Ken:> http://keneckert.byus.net
Oh dear lord in heaven, the "pr0n" reference with an obligatory +3 to +5 Funny rating! I tell you, I never get tired of seeing that one, no sir.
Back in the '70s and '80s, before the World Wide Web had made porn ubiquitous, and before Hustler and Penthouse had made hard core porn at least tolerated by "community standard" across the U.S., a lot of porn was advertised as "Swedish", the implication being that more liberal European attitudes towards it made for harder, more prurient porn.
(Given the tendency to think that cultures we don't know as much about as our own are more exotic, and possibly more erotic -- witness the European fascination with Polynesia, as typified by Paul Gauguin, or Margret Mead's willingness to be deceived in Samoa -- I wouldn't be surprised if porn advertised during the same period in Europe featured "hot American cheerleaders" or some such.)
So "Swedish porn" isn't just another porn comment, but a (somewhat sly) historical allusion to a time when porn was harder to come by, and the hardest was, if not actually Swedish, often labelled as such. I think the original poster may also have been suggesting, that given explosion of porn now available at the click of a mouse, we'd actually not nowadays miss the (putatively) Swedish contribution were it to, ah, um dry up or go soft.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Consider the fact that VDSL is just rolling out in Sweden and that it is quite affordable. Imagine 26 mbits/sec for $40 euros a month. In fact, it's a much better deal than almost anywhere else. Especially Greece, where broadband will run you approximately 850 times as much.
Now what can someone legally do with that bandwidth under the new law? You guessed it. They can watch government-okayed programming channels and view government-okayed content. These are the websites that will have gone through some sort of copyright review and approval process.
With these new laws, the powers that be will have successfully turned the European internet into something resembling interactive television. The existing media lords are of course quite happy with the new laws as their sphere of control has been strengthened. And the existing governments are of course quite happy with the new laws as it gives them even more control over their respective populaces.
It's hard to say how the Swedish populace and the rest of Europe will react to these new laws. Most likely nothing significant will happen beyond a few protests. But as someone pointed out, sooner or later the government will put one too many chains of laws and taxes on the people and the people will start to exhibit some very interesting non-linear behaviors. As history has taught us, there is only one way to take liberties back from an oppressive government.
However, for the time being, we do know one thing for sure. Sweden's rank ranking on the "most corrupt governments list" is going to take a hit. And it's about time -- Sweden is the only country on record for filing criminal charges against a news company for second guessing URL's.
Bob can continue to crack his crypto since this law will only appy to cracking copyrighted material like CD-copy protection. Bob owns the copyright on his password.
Bob even seams to be able to look at his bought DVD under Linux since it don't seam to make it against the law to crack DVD encryption for viewing, only to crack it for copying. And you will actually be permitted to take backup on your own DVDs but not to distribute them to your friends.
You can also crack the DVD coding region whihout penalty since these forms of control was exempted from the protection in the law proposal.
Having seen too many "no more free speach in Sweden" quotes, I don't think the majority of slashdot users really know about the current laws in Sweden.
The laws PROTECT anyone downloading copyrighted material. ISPs are not allowed to snif or analyse your IP trafic. That means, if you set up a warez site at home and do >1 TB/month (yes TERAbyte), they cannot do anything (and the networks support this amount of trafic without being congested). Try that in other countries.
Broadband (10Mbs) connections are very common. No need to download movies to disk anymore, you can watch them on-the-fly =) Last summer, some CTO/CIO at one of the broadband companies sayd (can't remeber which one) "We think it's good thing that people use their broadband connections (read: download movies). Otherwise, we would not get as many subscribers, would we ?"
Also, the swedish police lack in funding and hardly investigate crimes anymore.
Being a first class computer geek and living in Sweden, i'm not worried at all.
Or download the page and find the permission is missing.
Or as this is Sweden who's going to bother in the rest of the world to add a spurious header (or meta-tag)?