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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 However, downloading the newspapers unpublished newsarticles is not.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.
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?
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.
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.
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)