Battleangel

It’s official. The Swedish parliament greenlighted the controversial new copyright legislation which is loosely based on the European Copyright Directive (EUCD).

Even if the exact implementation will depend on the opinions of the legal system. Case law or ‘jurisprudence’ as they call it. A few things we can say with relative certainty however …

• Starting with July 1st it will be illegal to download and upload copyrighted material. Again, how and if this will be enforced is another matter.
• It will still be legal to make backups of owned digital music at least. Movies and software, well, who knows. There have been some bellicose statements against DRM. But the actual software used to circumvent DRM or protection may be illegal. But obviously even more impossible to enforce than file sharing itself.
• Blank media will be more expensive. Again, by how much is difficult to say. Some have speculated that DVDRs may increase by as much as 100%. Expect private imports …
• It will also be illegal to copy entire literary works. Like text books. Something that will not be very popular with university students around the country.

It is also noteworthy that even the far left supported the idea. Which is weird. Especially using old socialist cliche like “workers must get paid.” So much for the far left, when they don’t understand that they’re sponsoring big corporations and the ransacking of not only the workers but the average citizen. Plus, what kind of actual work are we talking about here? And how many “work” as musicians for instance? Maybe I should just drop everything I’m doing, become an “artist”, prance about, sue people, smash a few hotel rooms, and let the people feed me thru laws and oligopolies. Yeah, that sounds about right.

It is also noteworthy that it will most likely not be possible to go with some sort of ignorance defense here. Bugger me. Well, I suppose we’re gonna have to wait and see. Before we retaliate. The time for petitions is over for sure. If we want to change this we need to strike so hard at the financial core of society that the cost of maintaining this law will be higher than abolishing it.

Edit: In addition, it now looks like the legal council will take another crack the new law. So it may be premature to assume anything at this point.

Also … it’s interesting to note the kind of international coverage this tidbit has gotten. According to Google News, no less than 38 distinct news sources report the same story. Among them BusinessWeek and Forbes. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why this is being so heralded. Ahh, “finally” they cry, “finally, the unruly Swedes will stop pirating our intellectual property and maybe, just maybe this will keep the American empire afloat for another couple of months in a sea of bad finances.” Dream on.