Sweden To Outlaw File Sharing, Crypto Breaking? 578
Martin Kallisti writes "The Swedish Department of Justice has today proposed a bill to be put into effect, if it passes Parliament, on the 1st of January, 2004. It is in accordance to EU directives, but will also criminalize the downloading of material from the Internet without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Furthermore, it will become illegal to break cryptos, circumvent copy protection (mod chips et al), copy books, and as I understand it, use software that is designed to help with any of these tasks, and many other things." An anonymous reader points to an English-language article about this Swedish EUCD proposal, which also mentions a hefty $4 levy on blank digital media such as CD-ROMs.
Cracking Down (Score:5, Insightful)
but what if you don't KNOW?? (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you KNOW if what you're downloading is copyrighted or not and whether or not you have permission. For instance, variouis sites [beta-cc.de] have ripped off Slashdot's icons, which I believe are copyrighted by OSDN and/or Rob Malda.
By accessing the above link, you are downloading copryighted material without the permission of the author.
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Good for different reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the draconian restrictions on personal freedoms like getting blank cds and researching crypto, that is good for the rest of the world, because it will allow us to continue on while they are slowed down by their laws.
Heck, imagine if they don't have any local researchers to validate their crypto because getting a licence to do so from the government is prohibitive? We'd become the sole source of decent crypto which we can sell to them at munitions rates! Or give it to them for free if we feel nice.
the free outrun the fettered.
Irony? (Score:1, Insightful)
if it were for Ol'Sweden ... (Score:1, Insightful)
That's why we mass-moved down to SPAIN!
VIVA ESPAÃ'A!!
A European solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't prevent pirating, I think the fact that the law doesn't address *use* is a concession to that point. It seems that they rather seek to prevent pirating from becoming a European industry. I think this is analogous to US laws against gambling, where they still exist.
IANAL, but in Texas, the law against playing poker for money actually makes the *house cut* illegal. I think the lawmakers conceded the point that people were still going to play poker, they just wanted to prevent it from becoming an industry.
Having their cake and eating it (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't pirate anything, AND pay for not pirating anything.
Greedy and ridiculous.
Re:DMCA (Score:1, Insightful)
People can still download material that the author has accepted you to download. This law _only_ affects people using P2P software to download copyrighted material, nothing else. You can still use P2P software for other purposes.
Among geeks there seems to be a common idea that if something is technically possible it must also be legal. It's simple to knock down old ladies and take their money, does that mean it must be legal to do so?
This piracy of anourmous proportions must end, that everyone breaks the law doesn't make it ok.
EUCD is a failure already (Score:5, Insightful)
The EUCD was supposed to be a law in all European Union member countries already by last December. That is after each parliament had two years to pass the law. As far as I know, only two or three EU member nations have modified their laws to comply with the EUCD.
On the other hand, sooner or later the national laws must be passed. I personally wish that at least one EU member would refuse to implement the law so that the issue would be brought back to the EU parliament.
After the fall of Soviet Union, EU became the new safe haven for bureucrates so it's really hard to say how the EUCD situation will develop due to lobbying and politics. What is clear, however, is that most of the national parliaments have not been all that happy with many regulations the EUCD is trying to enforce. I hope that the Swedish parliament will protect its citizens from this legislation that goes way over any reasonable balance.
Charge a fee or make it illegal but not both! (Score:5, Insightful)
How can a government body justify making honest people pay for "assumed criminal activity." When do they start adding cost to paper because someone might attempt to use it in counterfeiting?
If it's criminalized to use P2P networks, then it is unfair to charge more for media to "compensate" for criminal acts assumed to be occuring without proof and due process. I can see one act or the other, but not both.
Frankly, the act of purchasing CD media and being charged enormous prices because of assumed criminal use, then it should then be LEGAL for me to put anything on it -- legal or otherwise since I have paid for the right, in advance, to do something illegal. In effect, it's double jeopardy -- punished before the fact and then to be punished again, for the same crime if caught.
I have no idea what recourse EU-folk have against this, but I hope it can be stopped.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Hahahaha .. yeah right. The movie studios and record companies are nowhere near bankrupt yet. Look the bottom line is there is no way to stop file sharing. It's here to stay.
The record labels could have cut the head right off of file sharing years ago by putting their catalog online and letting users pay a reasonable fee ($.50 - $1) to download an MP3. In fact, if they would have done it before MP3 caught on they probably could have introduced their own format with reasonable DRM and that format would have caught on instead of MP3(provided the DRM wasn't too limited). They didn't do that. Instead they continued selling CD's priced between $16 - $20 dollars and it has come back to bit them in the butt. There was, and still is, cleary a demand for cheap music downloads and when the labels themselves wouldn't fill that demand, others did. Digital distrubtion makes complete sense. It's cheaper and the consumers are going to be happier with the product since they can buy the tracks they want and don't have to pay $16 - 20 for 2 tracks they want and 10 tracks they don't.
The record labels are monopolistic and greedy and it's coming back to haunt them. Music piricy will continue to be a massive problem until a low cost alternative (like Apple iTunes) is made available to Windows users. There will still be piricy, and there's nothing the RIAA can do about it, but it will not be near as bad as it is today. If the movie studios and the RIAA think they can elimate piracy they are crazy. Software piricy has always been a problem and now that music and movies can be distributed digitally it will always be a problem for that type of media as well.
Laws... (Score:5, Insightful)
I predict, on this day, that within 5 years, we will see the crippling or perhaps even the complete elimination of all copyright, patent, and trademark laws. Things will get worse, much worse, before they get better. But mind you, when things get rough, we must remember to continue getting the word out to the uninformed masses while we wait for our revenge to fully take hold, that it may obliterate the copyright bastards of our time.
Sweden DOES suck (Score:3, Insightful)
For some reason, the media and government are a bunch of wishy-washy whiners, incapable of seeing far beyond the end of their noses. I think the problem is that politics isn't really a road to fame and power there (egalitarian society, dontchano), so the people who end up running for politics are well meaning incompetents.(*) You know where you get by good intentions.
I could very well see them putting this sort of levvy on blank CDs and then be suprised when sales plummet. It's like the government doesn't realize they exist in a global economy.
Not that it is the worst country in the world, but there is a reason I don't live there anymore.
BTW: Can't say that I've ever come accross that much swedish erotica, in much the same way that swedish fish aren't terribly popular there. Gott-o-Blandat, on the other hand, rocks. Salt-o-Blandat even more so.
(*) with some exceptions. Apparently a girl I went to high-school with is the Green Party's spokesperson. Sharp as a tack, that one.
Good and bad in outlawing the immoral (Score:2, Insightful)
Furthermore, I have always been against taxing blank media.
Making CD's expensive to legitimate users because some people use them illegitimately is akin to making medical equipment more expensive because some people shoot herion.
I'd like to discard the bathwater, but not at the expense of the baby.
Re:Cracking Down (Score:1, Insightful)
Why can't people choose to lead their moral lives independently anymore?
Re:DMCA (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure some people saw Gutenberg's printing press as the Big Devil too. And in some ways, it was.
Yes, copying has become easier. Live with it, and rearrange the industries around it, instead of lobbying to pass illogical laws.
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:DMCA (Score:5, Insightful)
You're absolutely right. Not only is the particular law broken, but Law in general is undermined, as it the citizenry's respect for it and their government.
If "millions" are breaking some law "each and every day", it's a good indication the law is a bad idea, and probably is a law that attempts to contravene human nature.
Better to repeal it, rather than teach "millions" that they are comfortable being causual criminals "each and every day", don't you think?
Re:DMCA (Score:4, Insightful)
This presumption of guilt and preemptive punishment is absurd.
Ridiculous is right... (Score:5, Insightful)
This law would effectively outlaw the Internet, which is based on the premise that it provides an infrastructure for moving data between consenting parties. In its place would be the presumption that moving data is illegal unless proven otherwise.
Re:You Own the Bits, Not the Music (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't own the bits. You own a license to play the music on the CD, for your own personal use.
If you own the CD, you've already paid for the license to listen to its contents whenever you want, at your leisure.
Since you are legally allowed to make a back-up of said music, downloading an mp3 file someone else made, is the equivalent of skipping that process. You could just as well have a friend come over and rip the cd for you on your pc, the end result is the same. You wind up with a perfectly legal backup copy of a song, for which you've already paid.
As for your last comment, it's quite idiotic, and seems more like a deliberate flaimbate or trolling, so I won't respond to it.
If I OWN something, I can do whatever the fuck I want with it. Period.
If I OWN a system, and forget my password, but can use another system I own to crack it, no law can stipulate that I cannot do that.
Re:Wow, talk about a levy (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are a business and you are backing up to CD then you deserve to go under.
I didn't read the article (I know, I know...) but I have not heard of people including digital back up tapes in the same boat with CD's, so I don't buy the idea there will be any additional taxes of levy's on that media.
And besides an 8gb backup tape is sooooo 21st century.
The company I work for (far from the cutting edge) uses 40 gb backup tapes.
I seriously don't see this hurting IT. As for other things....
Re:Laws... (Score:5, Insightful)
But democracy presumes an informed public. What happens when big media becomes conflicted about political issues? What would have become of the American Revolution without anonymous pamphleteering? Now we see states outlawing any attempt to hide the origins of communication. These are troubling issues.
How much will people tolerate? I think there's an ironic trend at work: the better off people are, the more oppression they will tolerate. "I have food on the table, why should I cause any trouble?"
I don't think the issue of copyrights will become an election decider because the media have a vested interest in promoting copyright. It will never become an election issue. People like us may be canaries in the mine shaft that collapses. Yippie.
Re:You Own the Bits, Not the Music (Score:3, Insightful)
CD Levy (Score:3, Insightful)
The same thing happened in Canada several years ago when a CD levy went on blank CDs--we paid a penalty for the pirating we're not allowed to do. And half the people in my dorm building who hadn't previously used filesharers said, "If we're doing the time, we're entitled to the crime" and started downloading and burning away. I sure did; I was paying a license fee to record my own original music.
I'll say it again: treating your customers like criminals is an unworkable business strategy. And making laws that a majority of your citizens don't think are fair undermines the laws that are fair.
Ken:> http://keneckert.byus.net
Re:I actually had an e-mail conversation with them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cracking Down (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, if strict application of your laws would make criminals of 90% of your citizens, it's a bad law.
Note, that asking "But, without a law to prevent X, how would the Y industry survive?" is missing the point. If the majority of people are doing something that would kill an industry, the questions should be, "what does the Y industry do that warrants preventing the people from X?"
Re:pr0n (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the '70s and '80s, before the World Wide Web had made porn ubiquitous, and before Hustler and Penthouse had made hard core porn at least tolerated by "community standard" across the U.S., a lot of porn was advertised as "Swedish", the implication being that more liberal European attitudes towards it made for harder, more prurient porn.
(Given the tendency to think that cultures we don't know as much about as our own are more exotic, and possibly more erotic -- witness the European fascination with Polynesia, as typified by Paul Gauguin, or Margret Mead's willingness to be deceived in Samoa -- I wouldn't be surprised if porn advertised during the same period in Europe featured "hot American cheerleaders" or some such.)
So "Swedish porn" isn't just another porn comment, but a (somewhat sly) historical allusion to a time when porn was harder to come by, and the hardest was, if not actually Swedish, often labelled as such. I think the original poster may also have been suggesting, that given explosion of porn now available at the click of a mouse, we'd actually not nowadays miss the (putatively) Swedish contribution were it to, ah, um dry up or go soft.
Oh well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Its really interesting, seeing it from my perspective:
1) Write P2P software to distribute copyrighted material
2) Goverment takes action to stop distribution of said materials
3) ???
4) Bitch at government
5) With new ways to circumvent goverment's means to stop copyright infringement, you download more music.
6) Government enacts more laws, now more draconian than before, to stop this
7) ???
8) Bitch at government
Hm, looks to me like the problem started with us.
Sure, the RIAA and the MPAA didn't give a flying fuck about John and Bill making taped copies of the latest White Snake album back in the 80's. Sure, there were some bootleggers selling copies of tapes en mass back then too. But they were few and far between and John and Bill probably only made copies for a few friends. Now, we have people downloading songs that were downloaded from a person who dowloaded from someone else who might actually have owned the CDs. Now, I am not all that sympathetic towards the big industries seeing as the exploit their artists and keep most of the profits for themselves but c'mon people, this is an intelligent crowd, you can see where i'm coming from, right?
The way I see it is like so:
You can GPL your software, you can put your music under public domain, and you can give your literature out for free. Its your choice. But when someone decides to put a copyright on a piece of material, you should obey the law. It's only fair.
Re:un enforceble (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure they won't up and arrest 1/3 of the population, but "token" busts and random searches/seizurs/imprisonments will certainly occur. Governments have always been good at enforcing laws just below the level at which the majority of the population will wake up and revolt.
Re:Cracking Down (Score:3, Insightful)
But, I'd much prefer to read something about proposals as to what "copyright laws done right" should look like. I have hardly seen anything in that direction. Maybe the EFF or other sources on the web have such proposals? Maybe someone can give us a link?
We know there is a need to refine the laws to include current technical developments. But, I mean, I'd be much happier if us Slashdotters would, instead of criticizing government's law proposals, instead constructively discuss some better copyright law ideas.
(on the other hand, this is Slashdot...
Any ideas where to start? Post some articles, people!
all that bandwidth and nothing to do (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider the fact that VDSL is just rolling out in Sweden and that it is quite affordable. Imagine 26 mbits/sec for $40 euros a month. In fact, it's a much better deal [theinquirer.net] than almost anywhere else. Especially Greece, where broadband will run you approximately 850 times as much. [theinquirer.net]
Now what can someone legally do with that bandwidth under the new law? You guessed it. They can watch government-okayed programming channels and view government-okayed content. These are the websites that will have gone through some sort of copyright review and approval process.
With these new laws, the powers that be will have successfully turned the European internet into something resembling interactive television. The existing media lords are of course quite happy with the new laws as their sphere of control has been strengthened. And the existing governments are of course quite happy with the new laws as it gives them even more control over their respective populaces.
It's hard to say how the Swedish populace and the rest of Europe will react to these new laws. Most likely nothing significant will happen beyond a few protests. But as someone pointed out, sooner or later the government will put one too many chains of laws and taxes on the people and the people will start to exhibit some very interesting non-linear behaviors. As history has taught us, there is only one way to take liberties back from an oppressive government.
However, for the time being, we do know one thing for sure. Sweden's rank ranking [transparency.org] on the "most corrupt governments list" is going to take a hit. And it's about time -- Sweden is the only country on record for filing criminal charges [theinquirer.net] against a news company for second guessing URL's.
Re:Cracking Down (Score:4, Insightful)
People went out of their way to buy it. Supply and demand rules the market. Always has, always will.
Now, trying to stop filesharing and levying a tax on blank CDRoms is a terrible double standard. If the tax is made to give copyright owners their dues, then I should be able to pay that tax on my blanks and copy what I want, because the dues are being collected indirectly anyway. If I want just to copy my OWN material I am still paying the tax so I am accumulating quite a bit of "right" to copy more music.
Then, they make copying music and downloading etc illegal - but by the same system they are admitting that everyone does it. Pretty stupid IMHO.
Murder is a ridiculous comparison. Murder requires premeditation, physical contact, and a clear knowledge of the implications of one's acts. Hardly on a par with listening to a couple of bootlegged MP3s, friend.
Re:You Own the Bits, Not the Music (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess some international treaty has banned owning people, but if you want to kill your own cow you'd certainly be allowed to use your gun (and your bullets) for that...
Re:DMCA (Score:3, Insightful)
Bob even seams to be able to look at his bought DVD under Linux since it don't seam to make it against the law to crack DVD encryption for viewing, only to crack it for copying. And you will actually be permitted to take backup on your own DVDs but not to distribute them to your friends.
You can also crack the DVD coding region whihout penalty since these forms of control was exempted from the protection in the law proposal.
Sweden is pirating heaven right now. (Score:5, Insightful)
The laws PROTECT anyone downloading copyrighted material. ISPs are not allowed to snif or analyse your IP trafic. That means, if you set up a warez site at home and do >1 TB/month (yes TERAbyte), they cannot do anything (and the networks support this amount of trafic without being congested). Try that in other countries.
Broadband (10Mbs) connections are very common. No need to download movies to disk anymore, you can watch them on-the-fly =) Last summer, some CTO/CIO at one of the broadband companies sayd (can't remeber which one) "We think it's good thing that people use their broadband connections (read: download movies). Otherwise, we would not get as many subscribers, would we ?"
Also, the swedish police lack in funding and hardly investigate crimes anymore.
Being a first class computer geek and living in Sweden, i'm not worried at all.
NOT Solved with a HTTP header? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or download the page and find the permission is missing.
Or as this is Sweden who's going to bother in the rest of the world to add a spurious header (or meta-tag)?
Re:Well, this sucks! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, we don't have caps. I have friends who have their 512Kbit ADSL downloding all day, they dl around 5 gigs a day, and have been doing so for months (one would think they'd run out of things to DL, but they seem to manage to find it).
I think that Sweds share a lot of data because of the connection speeds being offered in the country. How does an uncapped line, 26MBit both directions for $45 a month sound? [bostream.se]
Living in any of the bigger cities, you can get 26MBit ADSL, 10MBit ADSL and 11MBit wireless (works in the major part of most larger cities) for less than $50 a month. On top of that, SUNET (Swedish University Network) [sunet.se] is giving most stdents in Sweden a 10MBit line. Sunet itself is many gigabits (don't remember how many exactly).
With connections like that, it's not difficult to see why a lot of data comes and goes from the country.
Re:DMCA (Score:3, Insightful)
Same thing goes for any other ridiculous, inane law on the books today. If there's cash flow, then the law will never be seriously contested.
Re:You Own the Bits, Not the Music (Score:3, Insightful)
Would somebody please inform the RIAA of this? Owning a copyright on a song does not give you the right to shut down peer to peer networks and force the government into imposing taxes on blank media for your personal benefit either.
Re:Laws... (Score:4, Insightful)
Definition of terrorism (Score:3, Insightful)
Conventional war, whether it is applied to military or civilian targets, means to do just that. Terrorist war is an indirect approach. The idea is that you don't have enough strength to wage conventional war, but you have enough capability to inflict enough damage on the other side to provoke a violent response, and that retaliation against your own side serves as a recruiting tool for your guerrilla militia or to harden the resolve of your civilians to perservere.
By my definition, the Israelis are terrorists, and they are much better terrorists than Arafat and company.
The Israelis may have the military power, but they lack to alliances, political support, and other factors to wage conventional war on their Fatah, Hizbollah, Hamas, and their backers. So they conduct raids where they assissinate Palestinian generals. Note that when Palestinian civilians get killed as "collatoral" damage it is not that big of a deal, but when one of these generals gets killed, the Palestinian suicide-bomber machine gets into high gear. Now what do the Palestinians do with their limited amount of explosives? Do they ambush Israeli tanks in the fashion of the Chechens (they have tried it, but either the Israeli military is too good or they have not stuck with it)? No, they go and attack Israeli civilians.
Are these attacks on Israeli civilians putting pressure on Israel to sue for peace? Quite the opposite -- they are silencing any opposition to the Sharon government -- the attacks are what elected the Sharon government.
The Israelis were losing big time in the First Intifada where the TV images of soldiers shooting and rock-throwing crowds made them look like the old South African regime. The Israelis are winning in this Intifada because they are able to serve up their own civilians as victims -- Churchill won the Battle Britain when he got the Germans to stop bombing airfields and radar stations and to dump their bombs on central London. And Palestinian leaders are too dumb or too undisciplined to know what is going on.