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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."
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.
The law speciefies that the copyright holder must give the permission. Thus reading newspapers is entirely legal since we've got a "responsible publisher" of the newspaper. However, downloading the newspapers unpublished newsarticles is not. It's a method to protect their copyright.
in the U.S., as in virtually every other country in the world, under the copyright law, it is illegal to make a copy of something without the permission of the copyright holder, except for fair use rights etc. so this makes (unauthorized) downloading illegal.
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.
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...
They aren't hosting any copyrighted content on TPB. Its only an indexing site/tracker. Swedish officials recognize this, so I don't think any action will be taken against them.
There's a trick in U.S. laws regarding this. If they can't get you one way, they'll get you another. So if you aren't nailed for distribution of copyrighted material, you'll get nailed for possession of stolen goods. Hell, go ahead and really piss of the DA and they'll slap a terrorist label on your forehead.
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.
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.
What if you downloaded it as a 700mb file where every bit was one off from the movie.
In many (most?) nations, creation/distribution of derivative works is prohibited by copyright law. Your bit-shifted download would probably count as such.
Not just Danish - the letter Ø also appears in Norwegian and Faroese.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Take means to get into ones possesion.
Take means to remove an item from one position to another.
He took home the book from the library (the library is now deprived of a book)
She takes a poster from the pile (the pile of posters is now smaller)
Copy means to duplicate something
He copied the pages of interest from the library book (the library book remains unaltered)
She photographed the poster on the wall (the poster still remains on the wall)
(Excuse my druken grammar)
Actually, this law was planned over two years ago, but the real passing has been delayed several times. We've known about the new July 1 2005 date since beginning of this year, actually.
Disclaimer: IANAL. I only learned about this in school, and that's been a couple of years; what's more, I'm not from Sweden/the USA/..., so things may be different for you. Finally, I'm not a native English speaker, either, so I'm just trying to translate these concepts - in reality, there's probably other terms that'd be used in English.
Anyhow...
In legal theory, there's two distinct things when it comes to evaluating whether a certain offense was committed or not, namely the subjective and the objective offense.
The objective offense is essentially what's written into the law - for example, that copying movies without permission from the copyright holder is illegal.
The subjective offense is what you think you're doing when you do it - so if you, for example, download a movie because you think/expect it to be "Lord of the rings", you'd be guilty, basically, but when you think it really is footage from someone's wedding, you wouldn't. The name of the torrent etc. would probably be used as evidence for determining what's the case - if the torrent really was labelled "Fred's Wedding (1996).torrent", then you'd have a much better chance of arguing that you really thought it was a wedding video than if it was labelled "lord_of_the_rings_2003.torrent".
IIRC, it's typically necessary that both kinds of offense are present in order to have a case. Without a subjective offense, you could be sued for doing something when you had no intention to do so and in fact didn't even know you were doing it; without an objective offense, you aren't actually *doing* anything that's wrong, so if you'd be successfully sued nonetheless, that'd border on creating thought crimes.
Again, take all this with a grain of salt, but I think that's more or less what things are like.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
Take does not mean to remove an item from one position to another. If it meant that, you wouldn't be able to take a picture, take a look or take a break . You also wouldn't be able to take a breath as that would keep someone else from taking a breath.
Considering there are 33 definitions on dictionary.com, take is a flexible word...
The first definition:
To get into one's possession by force, skill, or artifice
So if we go by that it doesn't have anything to do with removal, only with aquisition.
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.