20 ms·

Swiss Copyright Law: Downloading Stays Legal, No Site Blocking

546 points by vezycash 7y ago

ecmascript 7y ago
This is great news, any attempts to censor the web should be condemned!
- caractacus 7y ago
  Yes, we should all have unlimited access to extreme terror materials and all the illegal porn we want. NOTHING SHOULD BE CONTROLLED
mnm1 7y ago
It's good to see at least one country with some sense and the ability to stand up to the bullying of the US. It's too bad more countries don't use their sovereignty to stop ugly US laws and culture like draconian copyright laws and insane things like the drug war from hurting their people. I mean what's the point of having sovereignty if you're constantly getting bullied and unwanted things forced upon you?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  The situation is quite the same in the US, is it not? So that "bullying" seems to be rather ineffective, what with not even working on themselves.
  - x3ro 7y ago
    When I was young, I once paid 400 Euros or so (Germany) for illegally downloading a music album via Torrent. I remember reading of cases where people where dragged to court and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per downloaded song in the US. "Quite the same" does not seem appropriate.
    - srbby 7y ago
      Did that go to court or did you just pay up when some ambulance chaser firm sent you snail mail threatening you to go to court?
      - pingyong 7y ago
        People did actually have to pay those fines in Germany for a while. It was pretty insane. There were even house searches where the police confiscated everything electronic they could find, potentially for months. It's not as bad anymore, IIRC some laws were also changed that sets maximum fines for this kind of stuff. But it's still pretty harsh. However, this is only true for torrenting. Because this was treated as "distributing copyrighted material" since you were uploading while downloading. (Don't ask me if there was some sort of byte limit, I'd like to know that too.) Downloading from other places (where you don't upload at the same time) was never really prosecuted since the "damages" would've been laughable anyway, plus it would have been way harder to get the IPs.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
      That's civil law, not criminal. But anyway: in the US, there are (were) some extreme cases with these huge fines. That mostly happened in the hay-days Napster and BitTorrent, and to people who shared large amounts of material and decided to fight the basic tenets of copyright law in court. Nowadays, you are far more likely to receive a "notice of infringement" from your ISP that only asks you to stop without any monetary consequences for your first or second such offence. It's a bit of a gamble, but this specific niche might be one of the rare cases where I'd prefer US law in practice.
    - tzs 7y ago
      There were two cases in the US with huge fines that I am aware of, and in both cases the person had to work very hard to get those fines. In the first, there was a women who was distributing around 1700 songs. The copyright owners asked her to stop and to pay $3 per song, which is an amazingly fair price. She had no possible plausible defense, because she had in fact downloaded and was in fact distributing 1700 songs that she knew she had no legal right to distribute. If the ~$5000 that would cost would have been too large a burden on her, she should have tried to negotiate a lower settlement. Nope. She refused to deal with it until sued. So they sued, over 15 of the songs. Why 15 instead of all 1700? I'll get to that later. A non-idiotic person at that point would have said, "Oh...they are serious" and offered to take that original settlement offer. Not her. She made them take it to trial. She was terrible at trial. She lied on the stand. It came out that she had tried to destroy evidence. She tried to blame her young children for the uploading. So of course she lost. In civil copyright law in the US, there are two kinds of damages: actual and statutory. Actual damages are easy to understand in theory. They are the actual losses attributable to the infringement. In practice, it is almost never possible to reasonably figure out what actual damages are. At best, you are going to have to have both plaintiff and defendant bring in expert witness economists and market analysts who are going to argue over what they should be. So instead the plaintiff can elect to ask for statutory damages. Statutory damages are between $750 and $30000 per infringed work. Note that it is per work, not per copy. The jury decides the amount in the statutory range. The low end can be reduced to $200 for "innocent infringement", and the high end raised to $150000 for "willful infringement". The problem with statutory damages is that when they were enacted the legislature was envisioning commercial copyright infringement. No one anticipated that we'd ever have a situation where ordinary people were infringing on a large scale. They probably should undergo a tune up to give a separate, lower range for that kind of infringement. I suspect that this is one of the reasons that they only sued over 15 songs. Minimal statutory damages of $750/song x 15 songs = $11250. That means that if she had not been a complete idiot at trial, the jury probably would have went with something close to the low end, getting plaintiffs about what they originally wanted to settle for, plus a bit more because they had to go through the trouble of actually litigating the thing. The other reason for only suing over 15 is that when you sue over a given song, you have to document that the song is under copyright, that you own the copyright or are representing the copyright owner, that all the necessary paperwork has been filed at the copyright office (US copyright law does not require registration any more--that went away long ago when it was updated to be more compatible with the rest of the world--but does require registration before you can sue. Oh, and I think you can only win actual damages that occurred after registration, so if you don't register until you need to sue someone statutory damages are the way to go). For every song you include in the suit, the defendant is going to challenge the copyright status, your ownership or your representation of the owner, the correctness of the registration, and so on. Since 15 or so songs is enough with minimal statutory damages to get what you actually wanted in the first place, there is no point in adding in the extra work to do more songs. It would probably would have worked out that way if the defendant had been reasonable, but things like perjury, trying to frame your young kids, and trying to destroy evidence don't make juries sympathetic and inclined toward the low end of the statutory damages scale. They went quit a bit up the scale, and she got hit with a big fine. And guess what the RIAA then did? The offered to settle for something like $15k. She declined, appealed, and has continued to draw this out, including having at least one more trial, and losing at every step of the way. I don't remember the details of the other case, other than he wasn't a complete idiot like the defendant in the above case, but still had to work pretty hard at it to get the numbers up there.
  - mnm1 7y ago
    Your comment doesn't make sense. The US has both civil and criminal penalties for copyright infringement. It's certainly not the same as in Switzerland. And there isn't a single country I can think of that bullies the US. So what are you referring to?
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
      Switzerland also has criminal and civil penalties for copyright infringement. Downloads, however, are not considered to be copyright infringement. The situation in the US seems to be rather similar. For criminal law, the most expansive is arguably the DMCA anti-circumvention provision. Mere downloading or viewing a copyrighted work, however, is not a crime. Only uploading is, as it is in Switzerland.
      - icebraining 7y ago
        I don't think so; in MAI v. Peak, the Ninth Circuit stated that merely loading a program from disk to RAM constituted copyright infringement if you didn't have a license for the software. So downloading and reproducing should be also infringing, since they also require such copies. (Congress has since passed a law to explicitly authorize this, but it only applies to computer maintenance, so the ruling still stands for everything else) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Computer,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp....
      - mnm1 7y ago
        This is false. Downloading copyrighted works without permission is illegal. It can also lead to civil penalties but that's a different matter. I think you're confusing the general lack of prosecution with the action being legal. "Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution." [1] [1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html
PostOnce 7y ago
50 year copyright term extended to 70 years
- aequitas 7y ago
  70 years _after_ the author's death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... Imho it's absurd copyright should still be applicable when the author is gone. Only to the benefit of those who arguably contributed nothing to the creative work.
  - ownagefool 7y ago
    Maybe, that's fair. But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? I'd probably go with a N years since creation or until transfered (either by death, or sale, etc), whatever is longer. This would give the author the ability to sell their creation, but it'd also let those that want to keep their baby do so, but my N years would likely only be around 20.
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      You family will still get a part of what you earned thru inheritance. What else is needed??
      - kd5bjo 7y ago
        Imagine that an author passes away between handing the manuscript to a publisher and the first printing hitting store shelves. Does the publisher owe anything to the author’s estate? Can another publisher immediately issue their own edition because it’s now in the public domain?
        microtherion 7y ago
        Or passes away before even getting accepted by a publisher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces
n1000 7y ago
Hmm. Maybe I am overlooking something here, but my understanding was that an important loophole in the (now) past legislation was the fact that ISPs were not allowed to pass on the identity of their customers even when they were uploading / torrenting copyrighted material. I know a bunch of people that received letters from their ISP saying that they received a takedown notice but did not comply. Maybe that will be addressed later: > On the hosting and liability front, there will be changes, but at this early stage, it’s unclear how that will play out on the ground.
huhtenberg 7y ago
> Uploading has always been outlawed and that aspect has not changed. Hence an uniquely Swiss-flavored BitTorrent client, aptly called the BitThief - https://www.bitthief.ethz.ch/ https://www.bitthief.ethz.ch/
- lm28469 7y ago
  It's the same in germany afaik. You're free to download all you want but the first byte* you upload will get you a nice mail asking for x000 euros. As far as I can tell there is a big business of law corps buying raw ISPs data and sending mass mails to offenders. * of copyrighted content
  - pingyong 7y ago
    Is it really the first byte? I am from Germany so I've always wondered how this is actually handled. Like 1 byte isn't really unique or identifiable information, there are only 256 different bytes after all. People send this byte value all the time. Do you really just have to send one byte?
    - rocqua 7y ago
      I guess if you are in a torrent swarm, any upload action is suspicious. Moreover, if you are talking about transmitting bytes in the file, you are probably including the offset of that byte in the file. That is a lot more unique (though it requires sending many more bytes).
    - danwills 7y ago
      I reckon "the first byte you upload" is being used as a turn-of-phrase here, and is not meant not to refer to the specific bit-sequence of each (or the first) byte of the upload. Rather the idea that the (eventual) metadata of the whole upload, (which I suppose actually begins before the first byte of the payload), is what would trigger the letter.
    - lm28469 7y ago
      I got one of these mails when my vpn dropped for something like 6 seconds (they even send your the timestamps). I wouldn't be surprised if they are seeding their own copyrighted work to figure out who's uploading. Once they get the IPs they simply have to ask the ISP for the name/address of the IP owner at that time. Anyway, however they are doing it they seem to be very good at it.
microtherion 7y ago
> Switzerland is largely free to make its own legislation That's a charming idea, but not really a very accurate one. Switzerland is under perpetual pressure to harmonize legislation with partners both close by (EU) and distant (US). Sure, we are free to make our own legislation, but at some point, those partners would also exercise their freedom not to deal with us under favored terms anymore, and, particularly with the EU, Switzerland tends to eventually adopt a large part of EU legislation.
- pingyong 7y ago
  In this specific case though, what are they gonna do? Stop selling media in Switzerland?
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    They can always do economic sanctions. Just look at what happened to GBP after the Brexit vote.
    - CaptainZapp 7y ago
      That has nothing to do with economic sanctions, though. That's related to the fact that the markets believe that the UK boarded a train loaded with nitroglicerine, going downhill with failing brakes.
    - reallydontask 7y ago
      what economic sanctions? I haven't heard of any
      - xiphias2 7y ago
        AFAIK EU wants closed borders and a different financial center if UK leaves EU. Both of these can have the effect of hurting the UK economy.
        pjc50 7y ago
m000 7y ago
> ...failed to fully address key complaints from the United States Trade Representative (USTR) made on behalf of rightsholders. I'm glad that a country reminded their local USTR that they're not a colony and he's not the viceroy. It's so easy to get confused on matters like this.
- pas 7y ago
  Yes and no. Naturally as the biggest IP holding nation/country it has the most interest in maintaining, strengthening, enforcing IP protection around the globe. However, small countries that want to encourage foreign investment/capital to flow into them, or want to protect their small but occasionally successful startups' IP around the globe (for example Skype, TransferWise, all started in Estonia) also has some incentive to adopt IP laws. Of course mindlessly abiding rarely enriches a small country.
  - jMyles 7y ago
    You presume that a legal regime of IP per se encourages the flow of foreign capital and is to the benefit of local successful startups, but what's the evidence for that? What happens when relatively robust economies start to reject IP conceptually, altogether? It seems unambiguous that they'll be at an advantage, not the other way around.
    - pas 7y ago
      I don't really support that view, I just explained what's usually the common explanation / motivation for politicians of smaller countries. The real motivation is probably simply the fact that radical politicians rarely get to the point where they can decide about US trade agreements and so on. And even if they do, realpolitik usually gets in the way of saying fuck you to forever-copyrights. > It seems unambiguous that they'll be at an advantage, not the other way around. Sure, they might gain some export advantage, but then countries can simply refuse/tax/toll their products. Some degree of protection is warranted. Trademarks, results of R&D, songs/tracks. The problem is that the patent process is largely useless, because where it matters it's not used (eg. for the pharma sector the FDA can and does grant exclusivity regardless of patents), and where it doesn't matter it's misused (fast moving tech, it's just used for fucking with the other market participants); the creative arts IP regulation is completely captured by the rent-seeking incumbents (Disney, the big 4 music "labels" and so on). The whole IP protection should be reformed, and it should be decided based on how hard it was to innovate versus how hard it is to copy the result of that innovation. (This means coming up with a new iOS/Android programming thing in a year, gets you at best 6-12 months of protection, whereas if you spend 10 years researching a new steelmaking technique, maybe you should do get 5-10 years of protection, because it's trivial to copy the process and it takes a long time to get the fruits of your innovation in that sector compared to the mobile app dev sector.) And for creative stuff holding the IP should be taxed, and the longer you hold it the more you should pay for it based on how much you made from it in the previous years. Of course FRAND should be mandatory (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) so anyone can use and build on top of IP, be it green steelmaking or new medicine, or just a fucking one-click pay-and-order solution for your webshop.
CaptainZapp 7y ago
One of the reasons, though, why doenloading is and remains legal in Switzerland, is that a levy is charged on blank media, which can be used for recording purposes[1]. Even though I can hear the wails and hollers it seems to me like a rather fair compromise and it's not incredibly high to begin with. [1] https://www.suisa.ch/en/customers/levy-for-blank-storage-media.html https://www.suisa.ch/en/customers/levy-for-blank-storage-med... edit : typo
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Same in Austria, there's that tax but downloading is illegal so we get worst of both worlds.
  - realusername 7y ago
    Same in France, except that tax is so high it's skewing the EU average and it created a black market of hard drives and DVDs.
    - Lutzb 7y ago
      Why not just order from e.g. Germany?
      - cf141q5325 7y ago
        Germany also has that tax. Its on everything from printers to usb sticks and dvd drives. Its especially fucked up since its explicitly to allow for private copies. Instead it is illegal to circumvent copy protection. Those tax schemes are a major rip off and nothing but pandering to powerful lobbies. Its protection money.
        realusername 7y ago
        Actually people still order it from Germany since the French tax is much higher.
      - 7y ago
pjc50 7y ago
Back in the day, this was why lyrics.ch was hosted in Switzerland.
ddelt 7y ago
Anecdata, but I’d say 90% of the piracy from people who would otherwise legitimately paid for content I’ve seen or read about falls into one or more of four categories: 1. The person can’t legally access the content at all, due to age, country of residence, or other imposed barrier 2. The person can’t afford the entire price of the content 3. The content has no form of sample/trial/demo, which imposes a fear of buying without fully understanding whether or not the purchase provides value 4. The person actually has or was planning to buy the content legally, but diverted due to DRM which is only present in the legal copies. All of these reasons indicate that the issue lies outside of the piracy, at least in my eyes. So I’m happy at least one nation has adopted some modern legislation about this topic.
- taneq 7y ago
  I think 2. is more ”the person felt that the asking price was unreasonable“. Most of us could afford to pay $30+ for a DVD but I’d imagine most of us wouldn’t be willing to.
  - iforgotpassword 7y ago
    For a DRM free digital copy I'd be willing to pay around 20 bucks after release and would expect a drop in prices layer on, just like with physical releases. 1080p, maybe 4k but I don't even have a TV for that yet. I'm only watching movies very occasionally so I'm not sure if that kind of business model would be feasible, but my guess is that just the paranoia of selling something without DRM is too big.
    - benbristow 7y ago
      $20 is a lot of money for about 2 hours of entertainment. If films were like $1-$3 for a high resolution download I think they'd sell like wildfire. I'd definitely pay for the convenience.
      - taneq 7y ago
        To put that in context, it's about $18 for a movie ticket where I live and $30 if you buy popcorn and a drink. But yeah, it still seems like a lot to pay for a few-year-old movie that you'll only ever watch once.
abc03 7y ago
While uploading is illegal in Switzerland, we should also mention that it is not actively prosecuted by attorneys. Historically, it was always the case even during C64 times when swappers in Switzerland didn't have to fear anything.
gillesclarc 7y ago
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shmerl 7y ago
Good push against copyright maximalists.
dstola 7y ago
Makes me think of that old anti-piracy commercial > you wouldn't download a car Made me and every person I know laugh every time; if I could, I definitely would
malthaus 7y ago
Swiss here I pay for Netflix I can't legally subscribe to HBO, Showtime, etc Hence, i download anything not on Netflix. Legally. Because i live in a country which is ruled by its people and not its corporations.
- mrlala 7y ago
  That's kind of a weird attitude. You get on your high horse about a country which you claim is more ruled by it's people.. yet you eagerly consume the content which is produced by a country apparently ruled by it's corporations? Maybe you should consider that the reason the US is able to produce so much of everything- whether it be tv/movies/social media/technologies such as apple/android/windows is, well, because it is a little bit controlled by the corporations? Yet because it's basically all digital, you are able to sit in your bubble and condemn the US while reaping all the benefits. I don't disagree that the US has a lot of problems, and I would love for this country to move WAY more toward socialist politics that actually HELP everyone. So go ahead and condemn the US, but the whole world is way better off technologically at the expense of our fairly extreme capitalistic system. If nothing was digital and everything was physical, and we had extreme advances only physically because of a country ruled more by corporations than people, somehow I think you would have a different attitude. I think people would be lining up to get into the country, even though there would be a lot of downsides. But because this is all digital, you can just take it all and then laugh at how backwards things are. I don't know, just take a moment to look at what you use on a day-to-day basis and think if you used nothing but what was produced in your country how your life would be different. I'm not sitting here saying the US has done everything- so please don't take it like that. But since we are talking about media and technology, and you even saying you can't legally subscribe to HBO etc.. well, HBO is a US company and everything produced here. Why should you be able to access it? Do you sit there and say "this is so unfair US didn't setup a Disney World here!". Yet, because it's digital you are automatically entitled to it apparently. I know I went a bit extreme, and I'm playing more devils advocate here. I just think the US is looked at very unfairly these days because you can use everything we do but you get the benefits of a more socialist culture.
  - guerrilla 7y ago

546 points by vezycash 7y ago

ecmascript 7y ago

This is great news, any attempts to censor the web should be condemned!

caractacus 7y ago
Yes, we should all have unlimited access to extreme terror materials and all the illegal porn we want. NOTHING SHOULD BE CONTROLLED

mnm1 7y ago

It's good to see at least one country with some sense and the ability to stand up to the bullying of the US. It's too bad more countries don't use their sovereignty to stop ugly US laws and culture like draconian copyright laws and insane things like the drug war from hurting their people. I mean what's the point of having sovereignty if you're constantly getting bullied and unwanted things forced upon you?

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
The situation is quite the same in the US, is it not? So that "bullying" seems to be rather ineffective, what with not even working on themselves.
- x3ro 7y ago
  When I was young, I once paid 400 Euros or so (Germany) for illegally downloading a music album via Torrent. I remember reading of cases where people where dragged to court and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per downloaded song in the US. "Quite the same" does not seem appropriate.
  - srbby 7y ago
    Did that go to court or did you just pay up when some ambulance chaser firm sent you snail mail threatening you to go to court?
    - pingyong 7y ago
      People did actually have to pay those fines in Germany for a while. It was pretty insane. There were even house searches where the police confiscated everything electronic they could find, potentially for months. It's not as bad anymore, IIRC some laws were also changed that sets maximum fines for this kind of stuff. But it's still pretty harsh. However, this is only true for torrenting. Because this was treated as "distributing copyrighted material" since you were uploading while downloading. (Don't ask me if there was some sort of byte limit, I'd like to know that too.) Downloading from other places (where you don't upload at the same time) was never really prosecuted since the "damages" would've been laughable anyway, plus it would have been way harder to get the IPs.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    That's civil law, not criminal. But anyway: in the US, there are (were) some extreme cases with these huge fines. That mostly happened in the hay-days Napster and BitTorrent, and to people who shared large amounts of material and decided to fight the basic tenets of copyright law in court. Nowadays, you are far more likely to receive a "notice of infringement" from your ISP that only asks you to stop without any monetary consequences for your first or second such offence. It's a bit of a gamble, but this specific niche might be one of the rare cases where I'd prefer US law in practice.
  - tzs 7y ago
    There were two cases in the US with huge fines that I am aware of, and in both cases the person had to work very hard to get those fines. In the first, there was a women who was distributing around 1700 songs. The copyright owners asked her to stop and to pay $3 per song, which is an amazingly fair price. She had no possible plausible defense, because she had in fact downloaded and was in fact distributing 1700 songs that she knew she had no legal right to distribute. If the ~$5000 that would cost would have been too large a burden on her, she should have tried to negotiate a lower settlement. Nope. She refused to deal with it until sued. So they sued, over 15 of the songs. Why 15 instead of all 1700? I'll get to that later. A non-idiotic person at that point would have said, "Oh...they are serious" and offered to take that original settlement offer. Not her. She made them take it to trial. She was terrible at trial. She lied on the stand. It came out that she had tried to destroy evidence. She tried to blame her young children for the uploading. So of course she lost. In civil copyright law in the US, there are two kinds of damages: actual and statutory. Actual damages are easy to understand in theory. They are the actual losses attributable to the infringement. In practice, it is almost never possible to reasonably figure out what actual damages are. At best, you are going to have to have both plaintiff and defendant bring in expert witness economists and market analysts who are going to argue over what they should be. So instead the plaintiff can elect to ask for statutory damages. Statutory damages are between $750 and $30000 per infringed work. Note that it is per work, not per copy. The jury decides the amount in the statutory range. The low end can be reduced to $200 for "innocent infringement", and the high end raised to $150000 for "willful infringement". The problem with statutory damages is that when they were enacted the legislature was envisioning commercial copyright infringement. No one anticipated that we'd ever have a situation where ordinary people were infringing on a large scale. They probably should undergo a tune up to give a separate, lower range for that kind of infringement. I suspect that this is one of the reasons that they only sued over 15 songs. Minimal statutory damages of $750/song x 15 songs = $11250. That means that if she had not been a complete idiot at trial, the jury probably would have went with something close to the low end, getting plaintiffs about what they originally wanted to settle for, plus a bit more because they had to go through the trouble of actually litigating the thing. The other reason for only suing over 15 is that when you sue over a given song, you have to document that the song is under copyright, that you own the copyright or are representing the copyright owner, that all the necessary paperwork has been filed at the copyright office (US copyright law does not require registration any more--that went away long ago when it was updated to be more compatible with the rest of the world--but does require registration before you can sue. Oh, and I think you can only win actual damages that occurred after registration, so if you don't register until you need to sue someone statutory damages are the way to go). For every song you include in the suit, the defendant is going to challenge the copyright status, your ownership or your representation of the owner, the correctness of the registration, and so on. Since 15 or so songs is enough with minimal statutory damages to get what you actually wanted in the first place, there is no point in adding in the extra work to do more songs. It would probably would have worked out that way if the defendant had been reasonable, but things like perjury, trying to frame your young kids, and trying to destroy evidence don't make juries sympathetic and inclined toward the low end of the statutory damages scale. They went quit a bit up the scale, and she got hit with a big fine. And guess what the RIAA then did? The offered to settle for something like $15k. She declined, appealed, and has continued to draw this out, including having at least one more trial, and losing at every step of the way. I don't remember the details of the other case, other than he wasn't a complete idiot like the defendant in the above case, but still had to work pretty hard at it to get the numbers up there.
- mnm1 7y ago
  Your comment doesn't make sense. The US has both civil and criminal penalties for copyright infringement. It's certainly not the same as in Switzerland. And there isn't a single country I can think of that bullies the US. So what are you referring to?
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    Switzerland also has criminal and civil penalties for copyright infringement. Downloads, however, are not considered to be copyright infringement. The situation in the US seems to be rather similar. For criminal law, the most expansive is arguably the DMCA anti-circumvention provision. Mere downloading or viewing a copyrighted work, however, is not a crime. Only uploading is, as it is in Switzerland.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      I don't think so; in MAI v. Peak, the Ninth Circuit stated that merely loading a program from disk to RAM constituted copyright infringement if you didn't have a license for the software. So downloading and reproducing should be also infringing, since they also require such copies. (Congress has since passed a law to explicitly authorize this, but it only applies to computer maintenance, so the ruling still stands for everything else) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Computer,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp....
    - mnm1 7y ago
      This is false. Downloading copyrighted works without permission is illegal. It can also lead to civil penalties but that's a different matter. I think you're confusing the general lack of prosecution with the action being legal. "Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution." [1] [1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html

PostOnce 7y ago

50 year copyright term extended to 70 years

aequitas 7y ago
70 years _after_ the author's death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... Imho it's absurd copyright should still be applicable when the author is gone. Only to the benefit of those who arguably contributed nothing to the creative work.
- ownagefool 7y ago
  Maybe, that's fair. But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? I'd probably go with a N years since creation or until transfered (either by death, or sale, etc), whatever is longer. This would give the author the ability to sell their creation, but it'd also let those that want to keep their baby do so, but my N years would likely only be around 20.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    You family will still get a part of what you earned thru inheritance. What else is needed??
    - kd5bjo 7y ago
      Imagine that an author passes away between handing the manuscript to a publisher and the first printing hitting store shelves. Does the publisher owe anything to the author’s estate? Can another publisher immediately issue their own edition because it’s now in the public domain?
      - microtherion 7y ago
        Or passes away before even getting accepted by a publisher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces

n1000 7y ago

Hmm. Maybe I am overlooking something here, but my understanding was that an important loophole in the (now) past legislation was the fact that ISPs were not allowed to pass on the identity of their customers even when they were uploading / torrenting copyrighted material. I know a bunch of people that received letters from their ISP saying that they received a takedown notice but did not comply. Maybe that will be addressed later: > On the hosting and liability front, there will be changes, but at this early stage, it’s unclear how that will play out on the ground.

huhtenberg 7y ago

> Uploading has always been outlawed and that aspect has not changed. Hence an uniquely Swiss-flavored BitTorrent client, aptly called the BitThief - https://www.bitthief.ethz.ch/ https://www.bitthief.ethz.ch/

lm28469 7y ago
It's the same in germany afaik. You're free to download all you want but the first byte* you upload will get you a nice mail asking for x000 euros. As far as I can tell there is a big business of law corps buying raw ISPs data and sending mass mails to offenders. * of copyrighted content
- pingyong 7y ago
  Is it really the first byte? I am from Germany so I've always wondered how this is actually handled. Like 1 byte isn't really unique or identifiable information, there are only 256 different bytes after all. People send this byte value all the time. Do you really just have to send one byte?
  - rocqua 7y ago
    I guess if you are in a torrent swarm, any upload action is suspicious. Moreover, if you are talking about transmitting bytes in the file, you are probably including the offset of that byte in the file. That is a lot more unique (though it requires sending many more bytes).
  - danwills 7y ago
    I reckon "the first byte you upload" is being used as a turn-of-phrase here, and is not meant not to refer to the specific bit-sequence of each (or the first) byte of the upload. Rather the idea that the (eventual) metadata of the whole upload, (which I suppose actually begins before the first byte of the payload), is what would trigger the letter.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    I got one of these mails when my vpn dropped for something like 6 seconds (they even send your the timestamps). I wouldn't be surprised if they are seeding their own copyrighted work to figure out who's uploading. Once they get the IPs they simply have to ask the ISP for the name/address of the IP owner at that time. Anyway, however they are doing it they seem to be very good at it.

microtherion 7y ago

> Switzerland is largely free to make its own legislation That's a charming idea, but not really a very accurate one. Switzerland is under perpetual pressure to harmonize legislation with partners both close by (EU) and distant (US). Sure, we are free to make our own legislation, but at some point, those partners would also exercise their freedom not to deal with us under favored terms anymore, and, particularly with the EU, Switzerland tends to eventually adopt a large part of EU legislation.

pingyong 7y ago
In this specific case though, what are they gonna do? Stop selling media in Switzerland?
- xiphias2 7y ago
  They can always do economic sanctions. Just look at what happened to GBP after the Brexit vote.
  - CaptainZapp 7y ago
    That has nothing to do with economic sanctions, though. That's related to the fact that the markets believe that the UK boarded a train loaded with nitroglicerine, going downhill with failing brakes.
  - reallydontask 7y ago
    what economic sanctions? I haven't heard of any
    - xiphias2 7y ago
      AFAIK EU wants closed borders and a different financial center if UK leaves EU. Both of these can have the effect of hurting the UK economy.
      - pjc50 7y ago

m000 7y ago

> ...failed to fully address key complaints from the United States Trade Representative (USTR) made on behalf of rightsholders. I'm glad that a country reminded their local USTR that they're not a colony and he's not the viceroy. It's so easy to get confused on matters like this.

pas 7y ago
Yes and no. Naturally as the biggest IP holding nation/country it has the most interest in maintaining, strengthening, enforcing IP protection around the globe. However, small countries that want to encourage foreign investment/capital to flow into them, or want to protect their small but occasionally successful startups' IP around the globe (for example Skype, TransferWise, all started in Estonia) also has some incentive to adopt IP laws. Of course mindlessly abiding rarely enriches a small country.
- jMyles 7y ago
  You presume that a legal regime of IP per se encourages the flow of foreign capital and is to the benefit of local successful startups, but what's the evidence for that? What happens when relatively robust economies start to reject IP conceptually, altogether? It seems unambiguous that they'll be at an advantage, not the other way around.
  - pas 7y ago
    I don't really support that view, I just explained what's usually the common explanation / motivation for politicians of smaller countries. The real motivation is probably simply the fact that radical politicians rarely get to the point where they can decide about US trade agreements and so on. And even if they do, realpolitik usually gets in the way of saying fuck you to forever-copyrights. > It seems unambiguous that they'll be at an advantage, not the other way around. Sure, they might gain some export advantage, but then countries can simply refuse/tax/toll their products. Some degree of protection is warranted. Trademarks, results of R&D, songs/tracks. The problem is that the patent process is largely useless, because where it matters it's not used (eg. for the pharma sector the FDA can and does grant exclusivity regardless of patents), and where it doesn't matter it's misused (fast moving tech, it's just used for fucking with the other market participants); the creative arts IP regulation is completely captured by the rent-seeking incumbents (Disney, the big 4 music "labels" and so on). The whole IP protection should be reformed, and it should be decided based on how hard it was to innovate versus how hard it is to copy the result of that innovation. (This means coming up with a new iOS/Android programming thing in a year, gets you at best 6-12 months of protection, whereas if you spend 10 years researching a new steelmaking technique, maybe you should do get 5-10 years of protection, because it's trivial to copy the process and it takes a long time to get the fruits of your innovation in that sector compared to the mobile app dev sector.) And for creative stuff holding the IP should be taxed, and the longer you hold it the more you should pay for it based on how much you made from it in the previous years. Of course FRAND should be mandatory (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) so anyone can use and build on top of IP, be it green steelmaking or new medicine, or just a fucking one-click pay-and-order solution for your webshop.

CaptainZapp 7y ago

One of the reasons, though, why doenloading is and remains legal in Switzerland, is that a levy is charged on blank media, which can be used for recording purposes[1]. Even though I can hear the wails and hollers it seems to me like a rather fair compromise and it's not incredibly high to begin with. [1] https://www.suisa.ch/en/customers/levy-for-blank-storage-media.html https://www.suisa.ch/en/customers/levy-for-blank-storage-med... edit : typo

ChuckNorris89 7y ago
Same in Austria, there's that tax but downloading is illegal so we get worst of both worlds.
- realusername 7y ago
  Same in France, except that tax is so high it's skewing the EU average and it created a black market of hard drives and DVDs.
  - Lutzb 7y ago
    Why not just order from e.g. Germany?
    - cf141q5325 7y ago
      Germany also has that tax. Its on everything from printers to usb sticks and dvd drives. Its especially fucked up since its explicitly to allow for private copies. Instead it is illegal to circumvent copy protection. Those tax schemes are a major rip off and nothing but pandering to powerful lobbies. Its protection money.
      - realusername 7y ago
        Actually people still order it from Germany since the French tax is much higher.
    - 7y ago

pjc50 7y ago

Back in the day, this was why lyrics.ch was hosted in Switzerland.

ddelt 7y ago

Anecdata, but I’d say 90% of the piracy from people who would otherwise legitimately paid for content I’ve seen or read about falls into one or more of four categories: 1. The person can’t legally access the content at all, due to age, country of residence, or other imposed barrier 2. The person can’t afford the entire price of the content 3. The content has no form of sample/trial/demo, which imposes a fear of buying without fully understanding whether or not the purchase provides value 4. The person actually has or was planning to buy the content legally, but diverted due to DRM which is only present in the legal copies. All of these reasons indicate that the issue lies outside of the piracy, at least in my eyes. So I’m happy at least one nation has adopted some modern legislation about this topic.

taneq 7y ago
I think 2. is more ”the person felt that the asking price was unreasonable“. Most of us could afford to pay $30+ for a DVD but I’d imagine most of us wouldn’t be willing to.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  For a DRM free digital copy I'd be willing to pay around 20 bucks after release and would expect a drop in prices layer on, just like with physical releases. 1080p, maybe 4k but I don't even have a TV for that yet. I'm only watching movies very occasionally so I'm not sure if that kind of business model would be feasible, but my guess is that just the paranoia of selling something without DRM is too big.
  - benbristow 7y ago
    $20 is a lot of money for about 2 hours of entertainment. If films were like $1-$3 for a high resolution download I think they'd sell like wildfire. I'd definitely pay for the convenience.
    - taneq 7y ago
      To put that in context, it's about $18 for a movie ticket where I live and $30 if you buy popcorn and a drink. But yeah, it still seems like a lot to pay for a few-year-old movie that you'll only ever watch once.

abc03 7y ago

While uploading is illegal in Switzerland, we should also mention that it is not actively prosecuted by attorneys. Historically, it was always the case even during C64 times when swappers in Switzerland didn't have to fear anything.

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shmerl 7y ago

Good push against copyright maximalists.

dstola 7y ago

Makes me think of that old anti-piracy commercial > you wouldn't download a car Made me and every person I know laugh every time; if I could, I definitely would

malthaus 7y ago

Swiss here I pay for Netflix I can't legally subscribe to HBO, Showtime, etc Hence, i download anything not on Netflix. Legally. Because i live in a country which is ruled by its people and not its corporations.

mrlala 7y ago
That's kind of a weird attitude. You get on your high horse about a country which you claim is more ruled by it's people.. yet you eagerly consume the content which is produced by a country apparently ruled by it's corporations? Maybe you should consider that the reason the US is able to produce so much of everything- whether it be tv/movies/social media/technologies such as apple/android/windows is, well, because it is a little bit controlled by the corporations? Yet because it's basically all digital, you are able to sit in your bubble and condemn the US while reaping all the benefits. I don't disagree that the US has a lot of problems, and I would love for this country to move WAY more toward socialist politics that actually HELP everyone. So go ahead and condemn the US, but the whole world is way better off technologically at the expense of our fairly extreme capitalistic system. If nothing was digital and everything was physical, and we had extreme advances only physically because of a country ruled more by corporations than people, somehow I think you would have a different attitude. I think people would be lining up to get into the country, even though there would be a lot of downsides. But because this is all digital, you can just take it all and then laugh at how backwards things are. I don't know, just take a moment to look at what you use on a day-to-day basis and think if you used nothing but what was produced in your country how your life would be different. I'm not sitting here saying the US has done everything- so please don't take it like that. But since we are talking about media and technology, and you even saying you can't legally subscribe to HBO etc.. well, HBO is a US company and everything produced here. Why should you be able to access it? Do you sit there and say "this is so unfair US didn't setup a Disney World here!". Yet, because it's digital you are automatically entitled to it apparently. I know I went a bit extreme, and I'm playing more devils advocate here. I just think the US is looked at very unfairly these days because you can use everything we do but you get the benefits of a more socialist culture.
- guerrilla 7y ago