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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
Will they be forced to shut down as a result?
We are sensible up here. However, this is all thanks to the EU.
Bork! Bork! Bork!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
A cøpyright nøtice ønce bit my sister...
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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
Isn't everything copyrighted?
Copyright Holder: YWHW
Year: 0
Fortuantely, duplication rights have been granted...
Some settling may occur during posting.
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...
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.)
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.
The topic is brain dead.
The law just disallow unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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?
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.
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...
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)
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.