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.

Comments

Re:Cracking Down

[mumblestheclown]

"people continued to buy it" is a meaningless first-pass approximation of what happened. Actually, counter to popular belief, prohibition curbed the actual consumption of alcohol significantly. however, criminalization led to every manner of sensationalism such as organizes crime, speakeasies, bootlegging, moonshining, and so forth.

people continue to murder despite murder being illegal. your argument about file sharing is as naive as it is unquantified.

This can't be true

[Arandir]

This can't be true. All the draconian IP laws come from the US. The MPAA and RIAA come from the US. The DMCA and UCITA are US laws. Microsoft and its DRM partners are all lcoated in the US. Alan Cox is boycotting the US. Every few weeks some random Slashdot poster threatens to emigrate from the US to preserve their dwindling freedoms.

But this is Sweden! As with all non-US nations, it's a socialist paradise of digital liberty. Is Holland going to criminalize marijuana next? Either this is April 1st in the Mayan Calendar or this must be a transcription error...

Fair Use in Swedish Law

[drdale]

It says here that Swedish law currently includes a meatier fair use exception to copyright law than, say, US law; anyone can make one copy of a copyrighted work for personal use (computer software excepted). If this is right, then this new proposal is maybe even more surprising than it appears at first glance.

Not as bad as it may look.

[hdw]

There's three different issues here.
1. It will become illegal to download material that have been made available in an illegal manner.
It's simply the law about recieving stolen goods applied to electronic media.
If it's illegal to make copyrighted material available for download, it's only logical that it's also illegal (albeit to a lesser extent) to download it.

The right to make private copies are made clearer and allows anyone to make backups or move material to another media for private use.
Including recording of TV, radio or other streaming media for private use.

2. The law makes it illegal to create and distribute tools for breaking copy protection and likewise to use such tools.
It does _not_ outlaw generic crypto tools, just tools used to bypass copy protection.

This will not make it illegal to backup your DVD, but you can't rip it, recode it and store it in another format.

It will make it illegal to decode encrypted DVDs using anything else than the tools blessed by the copyright holder.
But that's a commercial decision taken by the DVD distributors.

3. The levy on recordable media has been there for ages, it has been extended to cover new forms of media.
It's intented to cover the _legal_ copying, like recording streaming media.

// hdw