Slashdot Mirror
Sweden Bans Copyrighted Downloading
Xiar Prime writes "Swedish lawmakers have made downloading of copyrighted material illegal, one day after an 11-nation piracy crackdown. Prior to the passing of the law, it was only illegal to provide copyrighted material, not download it." From the article: " The law was drawn up to bring Sweden into line with EU directives and is also part of a wider crackdown on net piracy. It comes a day after the US Attorney General's office announced an 11-nation operation to catch and shut down net piracy groups."
This all comes down to being a stakes game. Are the rewards worth the consequences? I honestly feel examples are going to have to be made with *severe* penalties. I recently heard on National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/ one county was raising the fine for littering from $1,000 to $10,000! It may seem ludicrous, but I bet you one thing -- Mr Trucker is going to think twice about throwing that cigarette butt out the window. Same holds true for Piracy... make the penalties so severe that nobody in their right mind will want to partake.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Analyzers of this law has deemed it to be pretty toothless against piracy. The police themselves has announced that copyright crimes wont be prioritised. It's not even clear if they will investigate things further on invidual downloaders/filesharers since they consider this a crime which will not be a jailable offence. Most likely a smaller fee like for speeding or parking ticket. But we'll see what the antipiracy groups comes up with before we know anything for sure.
Our rights as consumers are dying.
RIP fair use.
You mean I wasted my time learning Swedish?!
I've been under the impression that downloading something in the US is not illegal, only uploading (providing it to someone else). Lots of people seem to think otherwise, but I've never seen any spesific laws that ban this.
What's the status in the US?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Doesn't that mean they can't download anything from online newspapers? Or anything written at all that hasn't been released into public domain? Sounds sorta broad.
It's a ban on downloading unauthorized copyright materials. Based on the title, you'd think that in some late night drinking spree, the Swedish legislators just said "if it has (C) anywhere near it, ban it." If the title were true, it'd really suck because then Swedes wouldn't be able to even look at any webpage because the Berne Convention (I assume y'all are a signatory nation) gives every work a copyright even if it's not officially registered.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Strange, how will they surf the net then? Does it mean the swedes are forced to use public domain only websites?
- These characters were randomly selected.
ATTENTION: People of Sweden.
You may no longer download the Linux kernel. As you will note in all the file headers, it is Copyright (C) Linus Torvalds and many others.
As you have a blanket prohibition on downloading "copyrighted" material (and not just "copyrighted material which does not permit you to download it or make it available for downloading"), you may not download the Linux kernel.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
That does it, this really sucks. I was just about to get my copy of "Fernando" too.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
i hope that osama guy starts using BitTorrent soon so we can actually catch his @ss and put him down...
Isn't everything copyrighted? And what if they payed the copyright owner for license to it?
Yarrr, maties... now when one of us walks the plank, the whole crew goes to Davy Jones' locker. Yarrrr.
Or, however that would go in Swedish.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
ThePirateBay.org, we hardly knew ye.
As we've heard all along, the law can never catch up with technology. Which is why I feel safe in predicting that the next tracker site in development will actually be hosted on the Moon.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
if you're in Sweden don't click the link. If you do you will have downloaded copyrighted material to your computer and will be breaking the law.
Of course, here I sit in the U.S. of RIAA. "Pot, kettle."
John
.......but Snus sales are at an all time high!!!
and don't mod down if you don't know what I'm talking about
Will they be forced to shut down as a result?
Bork! Bork! Bork!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
So if you co-worker took a screenshot of a Macintosh desktop, download it on your Windows computer as a wallpaper and hide the icons, you can call the cops on them? Cool!
See .sig. The title and article are misleading though.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I wonder how http://thepiratebay.org/ The Pirate Bay is going to react to this (read their legal threats)...looks like they just got owned
Since when did downloading pirated material become free use? Stop being an idiot. Banning practices that possess legitimate purposes is one thing; banning piracy is another.
A cøpyright nøtice ønce bit my sister...
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
...this webpage is copyrighted, and I downloaded it into my browsers cache... am I a criminal now?
At the bottom of every Slashdot page, it says "© 1997-2005 OSTG."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
What about the ISPs that provide all those alt.warez newsgroups, will they be held accountable?
If you'd read the first sentence of TFA, you would know that "Sweden has outlawed the downloading of copyrighted [b]movies, games and music[/b] in an attempt to curb rampant piracy."
So the law doesn't apply to "everything", and it's not a huge stretch of common sense to assume that this applies specifically to non-licensed downloads of movies, games, and music.
Duh.
if you don't like it here, don't come here.
Oh we are so witty today, aren't we?
Every step towards enforcing copyright is a step back. People should be able to create derivative works and advance the state of the art, rather than re-reaching the state of the art in every work, because it is copyrighted for unlimited times. Copyright yields not only lack of freedom, but also inherent inefficiency.
Before we go to such extreme measures, don't you think we should have a national debate on the right balance between citizens and copyright holders?
It looks to me that we're developing a hodge-podge of copyright/patent laws that has no policy thought and is simply a collection of knee-jerk reactions to what's news this week.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Oops. Please pretend that those were < and >. Thanks.
Fuck you.
Isn't everything copyrighted?
Copyright Holder: YWHW
Year: 0
Fortuantely, duplication rights have been granted...
Some settling may occur during posting.
What if you downloaded it as a 700mb file where every bit was one off from the movie. All you are downloading is 700mbs of nothing. And you have a tiny little program you run on it that shifts every bit to the left one adn then voila you have the original. Or is that not obfuscated enough to bypass that?
Gun companies: not liable for guns killing people.
P2P companies: liable for people downloading stuff.
Car companies: only get sued when they kill the rich people who bought the product.. ie. Firestone and the Flipping Ford SUV's.
Summary: Judges are bought.
Let me just say this. They can implement as many laws as they want but they can't do anything unless they catch people breaking them. This is where all governments are failing.
Anything you then visit on the web automatically get downloaded in cache. Most websites have a copyright on them or they say they have one. So can they or can't they surf the web in Sweden with this new law??
A Yank in Sweden
The bill also raised the tax per blank 700 MB CD-R to 24 cents a disc (I assume in Euros, not USD). I thought the idea of these taxes was to pay the *AAs for piracy?
The Pirate Bay do not host any copyrighted material so this law does not affect them in any way at all. But I'm sure the relevant authorities will try to do something to make it illegal... once they read the relevant Swedish laws, and manage to understand why this site is legal in Sweden.
Probably not that soon then.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Sorry, this just doesn't fly. The uploader knows what he's doing, but the downloader can only know afterwards. On second thought, you could be on the safe side if you only download from "trusted sources" like iTunes or whatever.
Maybe that's the intention.
As far as the GPL goes you needn't worry. The terms of the GPL are a copyright license, provided you follow the terms of the license you are doing nothing wrong.
Does this mean that there'll be no more legal threat amusement from Sweden?
My life is no longer complete. Bah.
Smegma.
Copyright law has always focused on those who create and distribute in violation of copyright. It's never focused on those who acquire something, whether deliberately or ignorance. When I go to a bookstore and find an interesting book, how can I know if it infringes copyright laws? Why should I be held accountable for finding out and punished if I do not?
The article itself notes that the police are unenthusiastic about enforcing the law. That's to their credit. But laws that aren't enforce merely encourage disrespect of other laws. They make a mockery of the legal system.
Not very bright Sweden, not bright at all.
--Mike Perry, author, Untangling Tolkien
I'm disappointed that BBC calls downloaders pirates. The term "pirate" when applied to copyright infringement first appeared to denote publishers who didn't pay the authors. They were likened to high sea pirates because they intercepted some of the money that the author could have received, like pirates who intercept goods in transit. Those who bought books from "pirates" were not called "pirates". To continue this analogy, only uploaders but not downloaders could be called "pirates" because it's they who competes with the original publisher. Of course, it would still be an overkill to liken an occasional file sharer to a publisher who did business on someone else's work.
I absolutely diagree with you on this!
As a general rule, the idea of charging people fines is a terrible way to punish the breaking of minor laws. I can't really speak for other nations, but in the U.S. - I see fines being levied as tax collection tools more than for any real interest in stopping the crimes they claim to help stop.
Where I live, you can almost tell how small a municipality is by how often you see the police sitting in one of the same sneaky places, spending most of the day looking for speeders. Larger municipalities with a bigger tax base don't *need* to pressure their police to hand out so many traffic tickets. They typically have more important things to do with their time.
The typical fine only punishes the poor. If you make enough money, paying a fine because you parked your car in a much more convenient place that happened to be a "no parking" zone is probably no big deal. Send off the money order and you're done. Might have been well worth the price of the ticket, really.
Nonetheless, making fines so high that even the rich get "punished" just makes it *impossible* for the poor to pay them - and that makes no sense either.
Crimes of "convenience" such as littering are going to happen whether the fine is $25 or $25,000. As another poster said, it's all about the would-be litterer's confidence level in not getting caught. In the case of littering, it only takes a split second to throw something out a car window - and especially at night, people probably won't ever see that you did it.
What would be better, IMHO, is in lieu of fines, order these people to perform community service. Make them pick up litter for a couple weekends. (Right now, we've got all these "adopt a highway" programs with volunteers - but seems unnecessary if you could make the people doing the littering do the cleanup instead.)
So, for all practical purposes, downloading is okay. Also the "fair use etc." you shrug off is exactly why it is legal, or at least could be argued to be so.
We use words like "Fair Use," "Right of First Sale," and "Freedom of Information." We use these words as a backbone of a life spent defending something, you use them as a punchline.
Usual Beeb drivel.
There are no EU Directives on this matter, fellow slashdotters, no matter what the Beeb says.
Just the usual anti-EU propaganda, I am afraid...
After the very sad Kelly story they have become a sort of government propaganda office, like Fox News in the US...
Thufir Hawat
Part-time Mentat
So does that mean you can't even view webpages? News sites always copyright their images, does that mean in Sweden it is you can only download the html text of those sites? The article isn't very clear, I hope for the sake of Swedes everywhere that the law is more clear.....
It seems there is a form of the BSA over there really pushing the law, but here is what the law enforcement has to say about it:
the nation's Justice Minister said that chasing pirates would only be a priority for the police if files were being downloaded in massive quantities.
This will strike fear into the heart of every obsessive-compulsive downloader, but who else downloads enough to show up on a police radar?
Qxe4
Since the IP-number of a persons computer is considered private information and breaking the law can't render a jail sentence, it is illegal for the ISPs to hand out information about who a IP belongs to. This law will change nothing.
I'm wondering about the actual laws here, not metaphores.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
How can something that's not based in fact get modded informative? Unbelievable.
Windows Update is (C) 1996-2005 Microsoft corporation.
No Windows Update for you!
Linux is (C) Linus Torvalds (don't remember the year), so no Linux for Sweeden either!
Begone fool Sweden! Back to the Dark Ages with you!
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
Would you also apply that to GPL'd software? In that Microsoft should be able to create derivative works and ignore the copyright restrictions placed on it?
The GPL only has any teeth in it, that unless you follow the license, you aren't allowed to use copies of it under copyright law. Remove enforcement of copyright and you remove any need of the GPL.
It's OK if they have permission from the copyright owner. :-p
It's about unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
So does that mean you can't even view webpages?
According to TFA lead paragraph, it's specific to movies, software, and music downloads.
BTW, even the text content on news sites (and most other sites) is copyrighted.
"The forces that are fighting to keep this illegal behaviour are incredibly strong."
-- Henrik Ponten, Swedish anti-piracy agency
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4642373.stm
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The article isn't too clear on what is deemed copyrighted material. Is it just movies, music, software, etc.? Were I living in Sweden and I viewed slashdot.org, could I have broken the law? Slashdot.org has copyrighted material (OSTG) as indicated at the bottom of every page. By viewing it, the copyrighted material is downloaded to my machine in the form of cached pages.
If anyone has seen this film, chances are that you will know what I'm talking about. If you haven't check it out.
The mill is the music industry.
i am a yank that formerly lived in sweden, hope to go back someday. where are you living? I was in the Trosa area (45 min south of stockholm on the coast) Yes i am aware that Trosa is the singular form of the swedish word for panties (trosor)
IIRC in Sweden, for example, traffic fines are proportional to your income.
Fair Use is about legal excerpts and personal backups and has nothing to do with making copyrighted materials available for other people to download so they don't have to pay for it.
None of your "rights" are "dying." You don't have the right to pirate.
Is violating the GPL something you get in a tizzy over? You need to decide if you're for copyright protection or against it, because every time you Slashdotters get up in arms over the latest GPL copyright violation, it's one more notch on the belts of hypocrisy.
This is Really Scary that a government -- any government -- can move this fast. Our best protection against any overbearing government is the slow pace that any change normally takes. Sweden is now on my Scary list.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Without copyright, the GPL loses it power.
But without copyright, the GPL does not need power.
Microsoft will lose its incentive to create a closed variant of a GPL'd program because it would not be proprietary and they could not gain much from it.
Finally, a reason for AMERICAN citizens to bash ANOTHER COUNTRY for corrupt, draconian liberty-bashing moves against its own citizens in favor of the antiquated business models of the motion picture and recording industries!
THANK YOU, SWEDEN for making me feel slightly less embarrassed about being an American, if just for a little while.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Copyright infringement is not legaly the same thing as theft, you could never prosecute someone for theft if they download something because legaly they have not commited it. Again, I'm talking about the actual law not stuff people just make up.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Especially when this analogy is bad. In "Les Miz" terms, what we have here is the relentless cop going after the guy for baking a loaf that copied someone else's load, and then eating this new loaf he baked.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Apparently these folks are unaware that everytime you download a webpage and its graphics you are using copyrighted material.
Thats the big hole in all this piracy house of mirrors. Songs and movies are not the only copyrighted material "downloaded" on the internet.
I wonder if this makes my web browser cache illegal?
will it be illegal to read it in Sweeden?
Interestingly, the article made no distinction between legal and illegal downloads of copywritten material. Is this just poor journalism, or has Sweden actually outlawed sites like the Swedish iTunes Music Store that allow users to legally download music? It would be interesting to see how such sales are doing in a country with such rampant piracy.
From TFA: But the nation's Justice Minister said that chasing pirates would only be a priority for the police if files were being downloaded in massive quantities.
So its the police chasing pirates, and only for massive quantities...most things are automatically excluded I would think. And it seems like a law which makes the police officer the "judge". He/She has to decide what is "massive" so on those grounds alone, any case can be beat..Now had the law stated, d/l'ing 24 meg of copyright music data in 1 year..we may have a problem.
#include bier;
Isn't material copyrighted as soon as it is created? Would this prohibit me from making music, holding the copyright, but still distributing it for free?
There is an additional point everyone should be aware of, since it concerns not only Swedish citizens, but most Europeans (more or less the same rules will be law in all EU countries during the coming years):
What really happens under the new law is actually hanging upon two earlier cases; one regarding UPloading (filesharing of one Swedish movie) and one case regarding Swedish law on databases containing personal data.
* The first case (a guy who is charged with uploading a movie) will decide the graveness of the crime. It's not yet decided by court whether he will be fined, or whether he will end up in jail.
If he gets the maximum jail sentence of two years (which he may well get, since it will be suspended anyway), the Swedish police authorities will have the right to search the premises of everyone that's suspected of a similar crime.
The results of such a search (the content of hard disks, CD's and so on) can be used for further charges against other persons.
* The second case is the charge (from several thousand people) against the Swedish "Anti-Piracy Bureau" (an organisation of large copyright holders, record companies and so on) that their continuing datamining - automatic searching for up- and downloaders - is against Swedish law.
The regulatory body, "Datainspektionen", has already decided that this activity is against the law, but of course this decision has been appealed.
In the worst case scenario, filesharing of un-authorized material (and we're not necessarily talking syndicated crime here, but basically the average user!) will be considered a rather grave felony.
In the best case scenario (of course, this depends on whether you're a regular user or a record company), filesharing will be considered a misdemeanor, more or less like speeding. Not allowed, but nothing that will destroy your life.
The basic problem - Angloamerican "copyright" vs. Swedish "upphovsrätt" is to complicated to even think about this late at night. This will prove to be a real hornet's nest...
This is kinda old
I wonder if Pirate Bay gives a fuck...
I sure don't.
But you've never had the right to copyright infringement.
... in effect it's an embodiment of the principle of "It's too little to matter", or "The law does not concern itself with trivialities".
Fair use entails copyright infringement by its very nature
We've always had that right, ever since we began humming the odd lines taken from our nomadic tribe's campfire entertainers.
So you're 100% wrong, since the parent post to which you responded was exclusively about our rights under Fair Use, nothing else.
What is meant by "download"? If it is transferring from one computer to another, what about things like proxy caches? Or Internet Explorer's cache on your local machine? I guess Sweden just went off the net.
A more important question. What happens to pirate bay? I'm going to miss their wonderful letters to all those software companies who insisted that Sweden had a DMCA like law.
Let's say I connect to some torrent site and start to download something, say "Lord of the rings", how do I know that this is copyright protected until I see it? How do I know that this "Lord of the rings" isn't someones wedding video?
This law is as stupid as the law that was proposed recently, a law would make it illegal to LOOK at child porn. Now how would I know what a picture is without looking at it? All feelings about child pornographers aside.
I think our government has been replaced with a bunch of headless chickens...
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
That's more like it. I've just been getting pissed off at people equating piracy to downloading copyrighted material.
Hard to enforce a $10,000 penalty when you can listen to all the music you want for $5/month from Yahoo! or for a bit more from Rhapsody.
Which one of you IDIOTS modded this "Informative" ???
.22 so you can kill your neighbors" in any way, shape, or form. To compare the two like that is just inflammatory and stupid.
"Gun companies: not liable for guns killing people.
P2P companies: liable for people downloading stuff."
No, they're liable if they're screaming "HEY! Buy our software and you can download all the copyrighted material for FREE!" - *that* is what the decision was. Gun manufacturers aren't saying "Buy a Ruger
"Car companies: only get sued when they kill the rich people who bought the product.. ie. Firestone and the Flipping Ford SUV's."
You forgot to mention that reports of known failures were being covered up. The Firestone tires weren't just on SUVs either.
People sue whoever has the deepest pockets and whoever their bottom feeding lawyers will tell them to sue. Example: Plane crashes. Who gets sued? The airline, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney(who manufactured the engines) - there are plenty of slimy lawyers. Check out this one with the nice domain name. Ugh.
Summary: Our legal system sucks ass.
so all the music and software under copyleft is still good.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The point is that, if they havent already, these laws are going to venture into fair use arena. Of course piracy is wrong, but just because the RIAA or MPAA dont like something, doesnt mean it hurts their business, nor that it is illegal. Is everything authorized until unathorized, or unathorized until authorized?
...lives on.
Error: No error occurred
If I were you I wouldn't fear the police, but civilian lawsuits. The main problem with these new laws isn't the police, but the fact that MPAA/RIAA/TONO(Depening on whichever holds the rights in your country) can file a civilian lawsuit against people duo this law. This is probably the biggest thing to fear in Sweden right now.
Just because the police say that they won't investigate doesn't mean that whomever has the rights to those movies won't. Prepeare to hear about lawsuits in Sweden.
You are forgetting that Microsoft has *actually* used non-proprietary BSD code in the past. So yes they have in the past and most likely would in the future, why would you think otherwise?
Now whether or not microsoft would actually continue to produce a product if it was legal for anybody to copy and use is another topic.
Removing of, making products to facilitate removing of, or selling products that facilitate removing of DRM are all illegal actions.
The people who write these sorts of laws are morons. Don't write off Sweden as a bunch of asses just because we get these kinds of laws - that'd be like the rest of the world deriding the US as a load of RIAA-sympathizing dimbulbs.
But it's interesting that the actual article doesn't mention that point.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> Swedish lawmakers have made downloading of
> copyrighted material illegal...
So that leaves Project Gutenberg and what else?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
From Reevaluating Copyright: The Public Must Prevail:
The copyright system developed along with the printing press. In the age of the printing press, it was unfeasible for an ordinary reader to copy a book. Copying a book required a printing press, and ordinary readers did not have one. What's more, copying in this way was absurdly expensive unless many copies were made--which means, in effect, that only a publisher could copy a book economically.
So when the public traded to publishers the freedom to copy books, they were selling something which they *could not use*. Trading something you cannot use for something useful and helpful is always good deal. Therefore, copyright was uncontroversial in the age of the printing press, precisely because it did not restrict anything the reading public might commonly do.
But the age of the printing press is gradually ending. The xerox machine and the audio and video tape began the change; digital information technology brings it to fruition. These advances make it possible for ordinary people, not just publishers with specialized equipment, to copy. And they do!
What RMS implies, and I wholly agree with it, is that if copying had been easy at the beginning then there wouldn't been copyright laws at all. In this sense copyright laws are completely artificial. These laws try to simulate real property laws in a world where there is no real property.
Here's an example how absurd copyright laws are. Suppose I go to a concert and listen to the songs. Suppose I have good memory and I can write down the songs using a pen and a paper after the concert at home.
The pen and the paper is mine. I used my mind to write down the songs. How is it the songs are not mine?
Mozart exactly did this. If Mozart did this now he would be in jail.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Community service has the same problem - the rich can afford to take some time off from work, or pay for child care, etc., while the poor may not be able to.
As stated elsewhere, this law won't do much to fight piracy. The police in Sweden doesn't have the resources to handle it, not to mention that it's rather hard to prove your case anyway.
However, this law also forbids you to create (and distribute) software that can work around copy protection. AFAIK, this means that some OSS, such as libdvdcss, will be illegal in Sweden. I'm not sure how great an impact this will have on Open Source in general, but this law seem to cause problems in areas not fully intended.
Any web site you go to will have images.
These images will have copyrights. In order to be sure that you are not downloading copyrighted images, you would need to disable automatic image download as well.
Even the web pages themselves are copyrighted
(although they usually have the date wrong Acme Inc (c) 2003).
In order for a user to surf withuout breaking swedish law every 20 seconds, he wopuld have to maintain a list of URL's that are known not to contain any copyrighted material, because the act of pointing the browser to them to see if a page as a (c) at the bottom requires the page to be downloaded.
In order for Swedish ISP's to avoid dbecoming accessories to breaking of Swedish law, they would need to monitor all pages for (c) notice.
Not only that, the lack of (c) notice does not guarantee that a page is free and unencumbered form copyrights. The Berne Convention which Sweden, US and most other countries have signed on to, regarding intelectual property grants the creator of an intellectual work ownership and control over said works, wheterh they are affixed with a copyright notice or not.
So, this means Swedish ISP from nmow on will be forced to filter all content, and only let theough content that explicitly is identified as public domain, or under a license that explicitly grants the page to be downloaded.
This law is very strange.
If you went to a book store, and bought a conterfeited book, should it be your responsibility to contact the publisher to confirm that you bought a rolalty-paid copy?
Or if you visit your library, should it be your duty to ensure that the books you borrow werew purchased thruogh th eproper channels?
This law, while it might appear to the lawmakers to address a loophole, and chart out a grey area of the law, instead has taken freedom away from the citizens, plus added more grey areas to the law.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
"Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders' exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, 106(1); and distribution, 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs' distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs' reproduction rights." See A&M RECORDS, Inc. v. NAPSTER, INC., 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001) (emphasis added)."
There you go.
PS: Bring back autopr0n!!!
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
Lawsuits? Wouldn't think so. According to Swedish law, either a prosecutable offence has occurred or it hasn't. You can't just go suing people.
There have be NO announcement on any of the Swedish news sites today. This is propaganda from Antipiratbyrån (anti-piracy agency) and nothing else. I can't believe that BBC of all news sites lowers themselves to become a propaganda channel like CNN.
You still would have needed to use an uppercase B. It's a Slashdot thing.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Looks like Sweden is ready to go along with the world to a viking past! Old viking-era laws on stealing and murder were quite different - if you were caught stealing three times, then it was the end for you, and not valhalla! However, if you killed someone, you merely had to produce enough silver equal to their rank and you were homefree. Yet the vikings had no problem going around raiding and pillaging (and trading, if that gave them a better deal!)
sig? what sig? i didn't see any sig...
How can you *prove* that you *intended* to download a copyrighted file?
Files are often faked, and mis-labeled. Who is to prove i was KNEW i was downloading a full copyrighted movie and not a trailer, or a demo copy of an application...
Or that my wireless wasnt hacked.. or pc..
Proving downloading is too 'iffy'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Civilian lawsuits in Sweden is a funny thing, even if you go and win one you still have to pay for half the court-costs. So... no you won't see much of civilan lawsuits in Sweden any time soon. We are not like the US of A.
Now, if he were downloading the latest Metallica or Britney Spears album, then we might have a chance in finding him since the full weight and fury of the RIAA to lobby Orin Hatch to put more money into finding him. I'm sure the RIAA will even be willing to toss in some of their own tracking information to find him. Surely if the RIAA is willing to rope in an 86yo grandma for downloading the new 50cent single, they're willing to go after OBL.
I bet what they find is that he's been dowlonading stuff from Dubya's server at Camp David.
To Alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
Just musing, will http://thepiratebay.org/ even care about this? They tend to take a pleasantly flippant attitude toward things like this...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
If you make enough money, paying a fine because you parked your car in a much more convenient place that happened to be a "no parking" zone is probably no big deal. Send off the money order and you're done. Might have been well worth the price of the ticket, really.
Indeed. There are some places here in town where employees will park illegally and just pay the fine every day they work, because it's cheaper than parking in a garage all day.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
And in Comm... I mean Democratic Bulgaria unorthorised copying of copyrighted matherial is dubbed "organised crime" (at least the police unit fighting that is the same one that busts drug dealers and whatnot - people have actually had their homes raided and their computers seized by mafia-fighters). The term "intellectual property" actually exists in the letter of Bulgarian law. The funny thing - our politicians are clueless as to what those things mean, and there are NO Bulgarian companies of any significance that would profit from such laws. Big Brother, rise!
Thanks for reminding me of how copyright works... I have now a cunning plan! I will post a load of mp3's with suggestive titles (e.g. britney-spears-latest-album.mp3) to my homepage (all legit, o.c.), complete with a nice html page, all formatted preddy, with a note at the bottom witholding the right to copy to all agents, representatives, friends and family of record agencies and their unions... Then, one "anonymous tip" to the BMI later (uk based here, substitue APB for Sweden, RIAA for the states), sit back and a) watch the server logs carefully, and b) wait for the cease and desist letter... Then, when I have evidence that they've looked at it (Server logs + letter) that they've viewed the page... I'll sue them for copyright infringement (bc their local machine will almost certainly have cached the page)... Then slander/liabel (can never rember which one is which), and *THEN* extortion, and invasion of privacy (how are they gonna find my address from my web site w/o snooping on me? It's not in the whois...) Joy!
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
Thank goodness it is only without permission beingoutlawed, and not downloading copyrighted works alltogether like I though at first... oops, mistake in another post I made today.... mybad...
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
So now it's illegal to surf the web in Sweden! ;)
As you will note in TFA, it is a law that applies only to music, games and videos.
No.
I can put a video on my homepage and you can download it legally from Sweden if I allow you to, even though I hold the copyright for it. When you create an item with artistic or creative value, you hold the copyright for it by default (at least in most countries). So all this fuss about downloading "copyrighted material" is bullshit; "everything" with artistic/creative value is protected by copyright. Even a game under the GPL is copyrighted, it doesn't mean it is illegal to download it.
It is illegal to download material protected by copyright whose holder doesn't grant you the right to copy/share it.
theefer
If I were a cop, and I was pulling someone over for littering in that county, nothing short of driving a Lamborghini would keep me from letting the guy off with a warning.
You, my friend, do not understand most cops.
Every day I read comments on how the US sucks. Seems the leaders of Europe and the EU sellouts, same as leaders in the US. Who would have thunk it? Greed being universal and all.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
Yup, we call them "dagsböter" (daily fines, or something). The idea is, much simplified, that a fine is set to something like 1 - 100 pieces of your monthly salary/30.
I think it is a great idea that should be used more widely.
"Soo, you earn $15 000 á month? Well, then maybe these 20 dagsböter á $500 will make you think twice about speeding in front of a school next time".
As of the copyright act of 1976(?), at least in the US, EVERYTHING you create automatically has a copyright on it, asigned to you (unless you have some agreement in place granting that copyright to someone else). And, considering the Berne treaty as spreading such draconian law to basically the entire world, I presume a similar default state exists almost everywhere.
So, by banning the download of "copyrighted" material, this law would prevet the Swedish from downloading anything at all. Except perhaps from Vanuatu...
Even GPL'd software has a "copyright" on it... In fact, the terms of the GPL itself give us the "right" to "copy" it in the first place!
I never really thought about this particular angle before, but perhaps someone more legally inclined than myself could elaborate on this? It seems to me that, considering the above, you cannot avoid downloading copyrighted material. Under that condition, therefore, how can one attribute blame to the recipient? It only makes sense to consider the act of distribution an offense.
So I guess that means the Swedish can no longer use mp3.com, ifilm.com, and a whole slew of video game sites. If movie trailers are movies then the Swedish can't watch them anymore either.
Oops.
Direct away from face when opening.
...download the text of this comment to your browsers. Thanks ever so much.
© 2005 Donnz
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
As someone who actually lives in Sweden I've gotta say it's scary how the country is the record-industry/movie-industrys complete bitch.
There's no other word for it. APB (the corporations anti-piracy organisation) is bending (or outright breaking) all the laws in order to enforce their "rights" and all the government is doing is bending over and taking it up the poop-chute. The swedish lawsystem just isn't up to snuff to be able to enforce laws when you've got a lot of corporate power/greed to fuel slick lawyers.
It's silly when a corporate organisation manages to get the police to prioritize copyright infringement higher than, say murders or rape. The most outrageous thing is that APB is really putting out the attitude that "piracy" is a worse crime than the abovementioned ones.
Just speaking my mind. Now go ahead and mod me as troll or flamebait.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
They've been pretty rude in their rebuttals to legal threats http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php, which is OK coz it was legal then. But what happens to the website now ? I'd hate to see this website shut down. Oops, will this post be held against me - 7 years from now, the way they are going after Cohen ?
2+2=5 for very large values of 2.
I have more 2d games than I could ever wish for.
And not one comerical software.
Also I have a few 3d ones that are free. Vegastrike would keep you bussy for a year or two or more. Clones of Quake 3 are comming. Tuxracer and its newer brother penguin racer. And for you car racing fans torcs. Where hitting other cars can be a verry bad idea.
Games there are more than enought free for anyone.
Now support the free stuff and tell the comerical you want it cheeper. All the comperical games I have cost me less than $10 each. Yes I am a cheep person but a legal one.
Ah.....But eventually your city will get the bright idea to pass that ordinance that allows them to ticket you every hour on the hour. With every ticket increasing in price. That shit will end very fast...
I know, it happened here in my city...
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
If the DA "slaps a terrorist label on my forehead" for anything that isn't actually terrorism, he'll be facing a libel and/or slander suit. At least the DA personally, if not the whole DA's office. This shit has to stop.
And before you trot out the argument that you can't sue him for that, you'd be dead wrong. If there's suspicion that I'm distributing copyrighted goods, then fine. Let them investigate. If there's suspicion that I'm in posession of stolen goods, again, let them investigate. But when they lose both of those trails and decide to label me a terrorist without sufficient cause, that's slander.
And I'll take their backers (read: *AA) to task for it too. Libel and/or slander (depending on whether it made it into print or not) is enough to cost the *AA's a lot, especially if it becomes known that you can do it. They expect people to just roll over and take it. It's like the mob. When you fight back, they're suprised. That's your cue to obliterate them. Sue for ownership if you can get it.
You have to use legal definitions when defining crimes. Dictionary.com would get thrown out of court. If you look up theft in a legal dictionary you find that it is taking someone else's personal property without consent and with intention to convert it to the taker's use (i.e. if you took something on accident it wouldn't be theft). Personal property is movable assets (things, including animals) which are not real property, money or investments. So, theft can only be the taking of actual property, not the copying of copyrighted works.
what sig?
""Swedish lawmakers have made downloading of copyrighted material illegal"
So you can't browse the web then, since everything you view on a web brower is technically downloaded?
The true owners of the copyright, have the right to give their material away..
Its not the content they are afraid of losing. Its the premium they charge.
Hopefully a lot of people will copyright their onstuff and then give it away.
What better way to say fuck you? (Mod down.. way down.. its the truth)
First, sweeden, the home for piratebay.org succumbs to the mpaa/riaa legal steamroller... Then an archive of pro-piracy support by bittorrent creator is turned up, thus showing his "intent" was to illegally distribute copyrighted software. What's next, apple switching to intel? microsoft using pirated software to record wavs? senators using pirated web softare to make html? I know a rambling anonymous comment, but this is slashdot.
The problems are many but all seem to hinge on the gact that transmission of information is desirable, profitable and, under this set of rules, illegal.
Legare, the root of the term legal actually means 'to choose'. Make a choice. The Swedes did and its has stranded them in the past.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Does this mean that I'm not going to be able to get the last three episodes of "Point Pleasant"? For some reason, some Swedish TV network has been the only one to get the rights to broadcast the series in its entirety, and (naturally) the eps have been popping up in all the usual places on the net. I believe there are only two or three episodes to go until the end of the series. I'd hate for this situation to interfere with that. It was a good show, and like "Firefly", it went before its time....
I for one welcome Sweden to our ever growing club of pirates. Arr Arr
It's a pervasive myth that "sampling is allowed" if only the sample is small enough. There is no such provision in US copyright law.
Thatswhy some countries, most notably Finland sets the amount of a fine relative to the earning power of the (er! for lack of a better word) criminal.
Here's a link providing examples. I quote:
At 46 miles an hour, he didn't set any land speed records. But Nokia executive Anssa Vanjoki could set the record for the costliest ever speeding ticket--a $103 000 fine. He was fined for speeding on a motorcycle in a 31 mph zone on an island near Helsinki last October, chief police inspector Olli Yliskoski said.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
You can either have a tax on blank media for when ol' CaptainZapp transfers his or his friends CDs to more portable MP3 CDs or you can have copy protection on your media. But you can't have it both ways you fucking hypocrites!
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
May I remind you that BBC shortwave programming began as BBC Empire Service on December 19, 1932, when the UK still had an empire (source: Wikipedia)?
As to whether you can chair something and yet be against it, remember that Mrs Thatcher also chaired the EU...
Now, as to the EU directives on copyright, I wrote:
"there are no directives on this matter".
I did not write: "there are no directives on copyright"...
This is not a moot point, in that the EU Directives on copyright DO NOT imply that downloading is a crime, only that protection must be afforded to rightful copyright owners. Whether by an ISP shooting illegal bytes passing by or stickers on computer or whatever.
The government of the UK may be indeed EU chair at present, but that hardly implies that it wants to develop it or protect it (quite the contrary, see my web site).
Thufir Hawat
Part-time Mentat
1) Chance of getting caught
2) Punishment when caught
If at least one of these is high enough, most people will think twice about committing a crime.
!ERR: Signature not found.
Wait a second, who the fuck moderated this a Troll?
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.