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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."
I've never understood the rationale for this if copy will be illegal. Shouldnt the penalty for copying be paid by those caught breaking the law? I am curious as to a valid reason for paying more for all media, including the majority of which will not be used to break copyright law.
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?
quote:
Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50,000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote
how can america get one of these?
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.
I think you're confusing Switzerland with Sweden.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
they are not that bad really...
if these kind of things go into action we'll have geek prisons. Where you'd have no contact with outside world, and you have to play games, and dnd whole day....it'd be like in your room...only your mom wouldn't nag on you all the time to go out and play in the sun.
I am tempted to say 'sign me up'....
They're not bad indeed. From what I know they're nicer than anywhere else in the surrounding countries, but keep in mind that like in the rest of Europe, they're getting badly overcrowded - packing up to six inmates in cells originally designed for one. The authorities have plans to build new prisons.
What is going to be needed is much more than geek prisons. If governments keep finding new, twisted ways to put people in jail, there is a foreseeable need for prisons dedicated to those incarcerated for treading on corporate interest. Now if they'd keep corporate crooks who ruin companies for their own benefits in there along with the system's victims, THIS would become interesting.
By the way, what do you think happens in Switzerland whenever somebody high-placed does anything extremely wrong - violating the separation between executive and judicial powers or making a government-funded company crash so that taxpayer money has to be used to save it?
Answer: nothing. Trials are made but nobody gets condemned, merely slapped on the wrist. One such example is the Swissair bankruptcy affair. Some of its perpetrators actually got away with a ~400k$ compensatory payment for the trouble.
Switzerland is ruled by an oligarchy of bankers, investors and upper management members from the country's major corporations. Interestingly, the swiss people can force them into things they don't want through the referendum/initiative system, but they keep pulling the strings and steer what the people thinks and wills, so they're never really taking many risks.
Overall, it isn't too different from any true democracy out there, except that when the people gets really worked up, things get done its way faster than before the next elections. If anything, we're just 1. one hell of a lot slower to take decisions 2. desperately trying to hide the shit that's happening in our country in the naïve belief we're a "special case" (Sonderfall, in german) compared to the rest of the world.
The truth is that behind the mask of orderliness and cleanliness, we do have problems. Four cultures coexist in this country and the reason that they still do is partly because they do not understand each other. Poverty has been revealed to be fairly widespread in a state where nobody talks about it (or one's income/fortune in general). Violence is flaring up in a similar way it does in the rest of Europe, proving once more this place is part of it. Cartels artificially raise prices for most goods and services (except consumer electronics for example, go figure) by 20-30% compared to the neighboring countries. Men in their twenties kill people and themselves with the weapons the Swiss Army gives them, trains them to use and makes them keep at home - we're talking about SIG-550 assault rifles here, and the number of people killed by military weapons is estimated at 300 per year. In a 7.5-million-people country.
In the end, it's a place like the rest of the world, only desperately trying to stay nicer and cleaner. Oh, it's comfortable and very nice indeed, but it's far from being devoid of problems. The hardest thing to stand is how everybody in here tries to justify his own acts by pretending it's for the common good, but it's probably just the same elsewhere.
The article by boing-boing is 100% inaccurate. Ok, make that 90%, there as been a revision of the copyright law in Switzerland. But beyond this basic fact, the situation is very different. The new copyright law is, compared to the US and the EU, very liberal. Not liberal enough for my taste, but way more so than others. For example, downloading files for personal use is explicitly allowed. It is explicitly allowed to break copy protection technology, as long as you use the file for legal purposes (private copy, education etc). Admitted, the law has its share of absurdities -- downloading is permitted, uploading is prohibited -- but still, it's so liberal, that the "International Intellectual Property Alliance" put Switzerland on its watchlist for it. Also, there has been real public debate about it, with resistance from political parties on the left, as well as free software groups, ngos, and even artists. The fact that the discussion did not take place in English but in German, French and Italian does not mean that it did not take place at all.
The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. ~Lao-tzu
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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.
What stops the US from having viable third parties is our election method (plurality voting). If we had proportional representation, where getting 5% of the votes means your party automatically gets 5% of the seats in Congress, or if we used approval voting or ranked choice voting within each district instead of plurality, then third parties might actually have a chance.
Plurality voting the way we run it encourages strategic voting that hurts smaller parties. In other words, even if you truly prefer the third-party candidate, your policy interests are better served by voting for the more acceptable one of the two major-party candidates; the system punishes you for voting for a candidate who's unlikely to win. See Duverger's law.
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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.