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Swiss DMCA Quietly Adopted
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Nov 30, 2007 07:34 AM
from the nothing-like-sleath-governing dept.
from the nothing-like-sleath-governing dept.
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."
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Canada's New DMCA Considered Worst Copyright Law 234 comments
loconet writes "The government of Canada is preparing to attempt to bring a new DMCA-modeled copyright law in Canada in order to comply with the WIPO treaties the country signed in 1997. (These treaties were also the base of the American DMCA.) The new Canadian law will be even more restrictive in nature than the American version and worse than the last Canadian copyright proposal, the defeated Bill C-60. Among the many restrictive clauses in this new law, as Michael Geist explains, is the total abolishment of the concept of fair use: 'No parody exception. No time shifting exception. No device shifting exception. No expanded backup provision. Nothing.' Geist provides a list of 30 things that can be done to address the issues."
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Levy on Media? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Levy on Media? (Score:5, Interesting)
This treats all spanish people as pirates, but says pirates are OK.
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Can some Swiss citizens enlighten us (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can some Swiss citizens enlighten us (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't care if the penalty is there, but rarely used. If it is only intended for commercial violators, then it needs to be written that way and you shoul
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What is that, you say? Yep, they're losing their GOLD (nationally) and their GUNS (likewise, nationally).
Here's how. Back in the year 2000, one of the last stable (popular) curren
Re:Can some Swiss citizens enlighten us (Score:5, Insightful)
1: "Suisse". If you're talking English, you meant "Swiss".
2: CHF Gold backing: It's true the Swiss franc lost some of it's gold backing in 2000, but (other than, for example, the US Dollar) it's value seems solid as a rock in a moving sea of global currencies. An inflation of some 1% (according to your(?) governmental factbook [cia.gov]) supports this as well as Yahoo! data on exchange rates [yahoo.com].
About that bank panics idea of yours: Remember the all-american Subprime Mortgage Crisis? Some swiss banks lost a few billion on it, some lower management positions will need to be restaffed, high management seems largely unchanged, the general public wasn't concerned at all. How well did british [wikipedia.org] and american [wikipedia.org] banks [wikipedia.org] cope with it?
3: Disarmament: As opposed to some nation in the far west, a majority of Swiss people seems to be slowly realizing the idiocy of maintaining an overproportional army while surrounded by allied and politically stable countries. With a very recent incident of an army recruit shooting some girl he didn't even know out of the blue, abolishing the forced armament seems nearer than ever. There's no debate about prohibiting guns completely, merely talks about safely storing army equipment outside of individuals' homes. By the way: just a few months ago, in what probably is a first step in the disarmament, soldiers are no longer equipped with any ammo to take home with 'em.
I realize that such events need to be put into perspective (during the writing of this post more people died of hunger than were killed by Swiss army weapons in the last decades), but if an action (forced armament) does not cause any good and very few deaths, it's still a stupid thing to do.
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Re:Can some Swiss citizens enlighten us (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Can some Swiss citizens enlighten us (Score:5, Informative)
wth.... (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:wth.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop supporting the same old bullshit by not voting democrat or republican? That's my guess.
In all seriousness... (Score:2)
In all seriousness, what would it take to create a _third_ party in the US, if one wanted to run for office but did wanted to be associated with neith
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Sure, it can be do
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What stops the US from having
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Re:wth.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem becomes numbers of people that need to be involved.
though America's democracy is in need of overhaul. eliminating the electoral college is a start. term limits would be a solid second. Politicains shouldn't be a life time job, but a temp job, maybe a decade or so of service.
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Re:wth.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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They don't.
Foreigners are usually not eligable to vote (a few exceptions on communal level) and Switzerland has ~ 20% foreigners.
In addition you must be 18 to vote on a federal level.
50000 sounds very low (it's 100'000 for a constitutional referendum
Re:wth.... (Score:5, Informative)
A petition is the weakest of the three possibilities. Anyone (minors, companies, you name it) can start one and gather however many signatures he/she/it deems necessary for any purpose whatsoever (e.g. changing "Stockwell" to "Doris" in Mr. Day's name). The government only needs to acknowledge the existence of such a petition, period. There's no need to discuss it, comment on it or do anything at all about it apart from acknowledging it.
A referendum (signed by 50'000 out of some 7.4 million in the course of 100 days) forces a national vote on a recently-instated new law. Still, more than 50% of all voters participating in that vote will need to "nay" it in order for it not to be instated.
A public initiative (signed by 100k in 180 days) triggers a national vote about any issue at hand. If i can get 100k people to agree that all cars need to be yellow, the government is obligated to include this question in the next round of public voting. To date, some fifteen out of some 150 initiatives have been accepted in such a vote, chances are slim.
Of course, all details mentioned herein refer to the Swiss system (and IANTooFamiliarWithAllThis, so I may be wrong in some, many or all points), which I find to be rather nice (especially when compared to some other ones).
Offcourse the media has been quiet (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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from the nothing-like-sleath-governing dept. (Score:2)
Maybe that's how they spell "you're screwed" in Switzerland.
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Funny (or really not) .... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Hmmmm. Good morning there how many finger am I ... (Score:2)
Switzerland != Sweden. TPB is in Sweden not Switzerland. So it doesn't affect them at all. But on a related note does
I've seen some swiss prisons (Score:4, Funny)
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'....
Swiss prisons and other tidbits (Score:2, Informative)
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BUT of those 280, 260 are cases of suicide!
And this is extremely low; of all 1500 homicide and suicide-cases only this many? And moreover, there are an estimated
Jail for p2p? Not according the the reports. (Score:2)
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This is strictly my interpretation, but: Since protocols like Bittorrent depend on the fact that downloaders also upload, so you're, at the very minimum, in a grey area, legally speaking.
The good news is that downloads from ,for example, a slightly sin
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Re:Jail for p2p? Not according to the reports. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm living in Switzerland and I can assure you that the Swiss public isn't likely to forget about
Boing-Boing gets it all wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
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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 pe
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Actually, I'd call this a victory! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [www.ige.ch] and German [www.ige.ch], against the existing Swiss Copyright Law [admin.ch] of 1992. Some of the notable changes would have been:
Compare that with the enacted diff, in French [admin.ch] and German [admin.ch]. 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.
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The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. ~Lao-tzu
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