Slashdot Mirror
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
And there'll be file sharing barons who'll send you your Britney Spears audio tracks in an iPod stashed in a bowling ball that rolls through a series of underground tunnels, with the authorities none the wiser
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
there is no possible way for them to enforce this.Even if they did I could imagine the headline... 1/3 of population rounded up in latest crackdown on downloading.... story at 11
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...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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.
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.
This post is dedicated to all of those
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."
Asking them to clarify a few things.
It won't actually be as dreadful as the DMCA, since it will only be illegal to break a copyright protection system if you're going to make a copy, it won't be illegal to circumvent it to use it as it's meant to be used. I.e. watching a DVD movie on your linux computer using DeCSS to "break" the crypto won't be illegal.
Neither will these redicilous "region codes" be protected, they can still be legally circumvented.
Further, it won't be illegal to break the copyright protection system on these new "CD's", if you're only going to play them in your computer.
If anyone has any questions regarding this, just send them a well written e-mail, since they're very helpful and will answer all of your questions quite fast. (a few hours for mine) -L
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
Back in the day, being asked to give a couple bucks to King George III for some tea caused quite an outrage. First there were tea boycotts. Then some guys dressed up like Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships and threw their tea into the harbor. Later guns started firing. Lots of people died. A new country was born. And we're all (those of us in the US) very proud of all this.
/. high crime. Fomenting an uncomfortable discussion. And that's just talking! God forbid anyone ever actually did anything!
All because of tea.
Now money that is spent on the media used to promote free communication should be taxed? Certain senators want to destroy people's computers? The US attorney general wants to circumvent the right to a fair trial? Blowing up Palistinian families, children and all, with US missles is "defense", but the impoverished occupied Palistinian nation's response is "terrorism"? Launching thousands and thousands of sorties, killing tens of thousands of unwilling soldiers to prevent "mass destruction" by weapons that cannot be found is not ironic? Our economy is a shambles. The rich are laughing. And our commander-in-chief wants to appoint this penis to the bench!
Osama bin Laden is free today. US citizens are not. And we would like the rest of the world to follow our lead. God bless Sweden for seeing the way. I'm Swedish. American. And pissed.
Flamebait? It's a
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
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.
In fact, it actually widens some rights, for example, the right to copy digital materials to help disabled people and easing the process for schools to make digital copies of material. But alot of people read the article and got up in arms. *Rabble rabble rabble*. The real proposal from the Justice department (in Swedish):
Press release
Part 1 of the proposal
Part 2 and appendixes
We still have the problem of blank media levies in Finland. The current levy is 0.25 (euro-)cents per minute for data CD-R(W)'s and 0.19 cents per minute for (computer-writeable) DVD-R(W)'s. Per CD/DVD, the levy is about 20 cents (little more in USD cents).
However, not everybody has to pay the levy: if a company makes a written statement that it won't record copyright-royalty-due material on CD's, the company can then buy levy-free CD's. However, the option is only available to companies, not to private individuals.
Well... at least here in Finland (which is scarily close to Sweden), people do that (import CD's for their own use). The catch is that if you import more than 20 (or so) at a time, you have to pay the levy. People have tried this, and the CD's got stuck in the customs and were released only after the levies were paid.Actually, an acquitance of mine met the bit^H^H^Hlady in charge of the levy department of Teosto (our local RIAA-equivalent). When this acquitance of mine suggested what is said in the quote above to the Teosto boss she just about blew her fuse... according to her, the levies are used to support domestic artists (most of whom suck big time).
The point is that while most people who do copy music copy music composed & performed by foreign artists, the levies do not go to those foreign artists. Basically that means that the system is grossly unfair for anybody but our domestic artists.
Be happy if the fee is levied only on removable media. Here they're thinking of levying that levy on ALL medias to which you can record music, up to and including computer hard disks. I really do hope that the proposed act does not pass in the parliament.
99 bottles of beer on the wall... take one down, chug it a-down 98 bottles of beer on the wall... 98 bottles of beer on
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.
This is not a good law, to be sure, but the blurb at the top is just plain wrong.
Most of it is just a codification of what we already know - you may not copy copyrighted works other than for specific, well-defined purposes (research, private copies and so on). And no, file trading networks are _not_ outlawed in any way, shape or form (the press release from the justice ministry was misleading on that issue).
The thing that can rile people is that you aren't allowed to break copy protection. Well, actually reading the proposal, the picture is not as clear.
First, any content holder _must_ provide a way for disabled to access the media (it could be by sending a different version to those asking for it, for example). Also, breaking protection on documents and the like in the public area is allowed (courts that want some material for a court case, for instance).
But, and here what's interesting: the law only protects protection mechanisms that are _solely_ for hindering copying.
* It does explicitly _not_ protect stuff like region coding on DVD:s (they have that as an example in the text). You are _always_ allowed to break stuff to make use of the media in intended ways, and as DVD:s are meant to be played, region coding has no protection.
* When one mechanism is used for copy protection, and has as a consequence that intended use is hindered, it no longer has protection. Intended use trumps protection in other words. So DeCSS is likely perfectly legal to use.
* The law explicitly does _not_ require device manufacturers (or OS writers) to include support for any copy protection mechanism. Media giants can thus not stop the sale of players that do not include some protection scheme. Nobody can ask for operating systems to include DRM.
Oh, and $4 for blank media? I suggest somebody brush up on their mathematics: the suggestion is about $0.4 - still too much (and gives rise to the question if you haven't actually paid for the right to make a copy of something on the media), but it's nowhere near the outrage implied in the blurb.
So, the law is not good, but it is not the kind of disaster people here seem to think it is either. With some adjustments (not making private copies a permissive right), it is quite livable.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
There's three different issues here.
// hdw
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.
Executive Pope (small) Kallisti Engineering