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Swiss DMCA Quietly Adopted
roady writes "We have seen a lot of talk over the years about the Canadian DMCA. But few know about the Swiss version recently adopted by law makers ... not even the Swiss people.
The government and media have been very quiet, probably to avoid a referendum. Indeed, Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50,000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote against the new copyright law. In this version of the DMCA, sharing a file on P2P networks will land you one year in jail, even though the law mandates a levy on blank media. The history of the law is available online."
How hard it is to strike down the law? If 50,000 citizens some petition or what not, would it be possible to hold a referendum?
They are the beneficiaries of this new law. That has been the problem with the copyright laws from the beginning, those who form the public opinion (Not just news agencies, but media in general) are in mostly FOR these laws.
Take Futurama, it shows a future that is truly nasty where nobody has any morals whatsoever. What is the ONE thing they all seemed to get worked up about, the one time the show tried to send a morale message? The evils of napster and how the geeks enslaved those poor stars.
Expecting the media to report on this kinda stuff is like expecting a news story on "newsreaders make way to much money new study shows. Could be replaced by trained chimp".
What next, expect politicians to rant about their own pay increases?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Strange that both Canada and the Swiss governments have put in DMCAs as we here in america are increasingly calling for it to be repealed. Really is there any reason for this "law"? Or is this just another "WE MUST ACT" legislation that was misunderstood by the governments and poorly written? I hope that their Pirate Party over there will start rallying for a referendum to get that taken out.
Also does this affect (/directly attack) The Pirate Bay?
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
It sounds like a great idea (more power to the people and all), but you have to be careful about the details of the implementation. If a well-meaning but vocal minority can force consideration of an issue by getting "only" 50000 signatures, is that truly a good thing? In Switzerland, 50000 might be a reasonable number for a petition like this, but in a larger country, the number would have to be much larger.
Even then, if there is inadequate participation from the general population you can get the same kind of problem as exists for voting if people are too apathetic about it -- i.e. that relatively small minorities can ultimately control the vote outcome, regardless of what the whole electorate actually wants. You can say, "Well, if they don't vote, the rest of the population get what they deserve", but everyone would have to live with the results. Try to imagine what it would be like if, say, only 20% of eligible voters do manage to swing things their way.
In Canada a few years ago the leader of one of the political parties, Stockwell Day, was a strong advocate of this kind of petition-based referendum. The threshold he advocated was "3% of Canadian voters", or about 350000. A comedian on a popular tv show called on people to sign a petition to have Mr. Day change his first name to "Doris". More than enough signatures were collected.
So, be careful what you wish for.
Yes, it is certainly hard to understand. In Spain we have a levy on media (which can be bypassed by buying from an international store online), but it is LEGAL to download copyrighted music, if it's not used for profit, only for private use. So, I can download every movie and every song on the internet, and I'm rightfully allowed to do it. To compensate, I have to pay a levy on media. Worth it, in my opinion, as this levy only affects CDs and DVDs for the moment, and not HDDs.
This treats all spanish people as pirates, but says pirates are OK.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
I wonder why the OP wishes to conflate the ideas of media levy and whether or not it is legal to share.
AFAIK (and IANAL), the new Swiss law also stipulates that there is no crime in downloading or possessing copyright material.
The levy on blank media applies to those who would download and store media, who are not committing any crime in doing so.
The reasoning for that is that the burden of figuring out if a service is legal or not can not be put on the consumer. I.e. a consumer doesn't necessarily know the legal difference between the Itunes store and a service like allofmp3 (which, alas, is perfectly legal in Switzerland.
How liberal the law actually is is very easy to detect: Just observe the foaming and frothing of the resident IFPI dudes...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Apparently, RapidShare.de is based in Germany, RapidShare.com in Switzerland. The servers of both domains seem to be located in Germany (which is, coincidentally, widely known for cheap bandwidth and server hosting/housing). The current legal situation after some battles with the GEMA (The german equivalent to the RIAA) seem to be DMCAy to me RapidShare is obliged to take down any infringing files upon individual request by the respective copyright holder.
Yeah, I don't understand Levy's either. The government shouldn't be responsible for ensuring a dying industry that employs very few people (compared to industries like Auto or Steel) remains profitable.
The electoral college is irrelevant. The number of cases in which it changes anything is small, and many people agree with the reasoning behind it anyway.
What would really improve America's democracy is to make it smaller. That is, to shift whatever power the federal government doesn't absolutely need (per its constitutional duties and powers) to the states, and to encourage the states to shift as much power as makes sense to municipalities, where direct democracy works well. The first thing we should do is repeal the 16th and 17th amendments. Go back to requiring the federal government to get its funding from the states, and make the senate beholden to the state legislatures whose responsibility it is to raise the funds, and power will quickly shift back where it belongs.
Instead, we should amend the constitution to apportion the expenses of the federal government to the states proportionally to state GDP (rather than proportionally to population to avoid overburdening poor states), and requiring the states to pay the bill, regardless of the effect on their own budgets. That will shift the deficit spending to the state level and avoid disturbing the funding of current federal programs, unless and until the programs are changed, eliminated or moved through legislative action.
Of course, none of it will ever happen, but elimination of the electoral college won't either, and my suggestion would actually accomplish something.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
How does "levy on blank media" work, anyway? Proportionally divided up by number and/or total dollar value of albums sold, per company or person who sells them?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm living in Switzerland and I can assure you that the Swiss public isn't likely to forget about the existence of these tools.
The reason why we got a relatively liberal version of the anti-circumvention law is that the politicians were afraid that otherwise there'd be a successful referendum.
As long as we don't do something stupid like e.g. joining the EU the fundamental situation that Swiss citizens have real voting power isn't going to change.
I would call this a victory, considering that all of the DMCA-like provisions that had been proposed have been stripped out in the end.
Here's the originally proposed diff, in French and German, against the existing Swiss Copyright Law of 1992. Some of the notable changes would have been:
Compare that with the enacted diff, in French and German. None of the provisions above remains. Some of the notable features of the new law are:
From my cursory reading of the law, I would say that it's all upside and no downside for content consumers.