The Swedish Parliament on Wednesday
passed a
series of laws to discourage unauthorized digital copying. The laws, which
go into effect July 1, implement long-overdue provisions of the European Union
Copyright Directive (EUCD) of 2002 for Sweden, including anti-circumvention
measures similar to DMCA 1201 in the United States. More controversially,
the new laws also make downloading unauthorized copies of copyrighted material
illegal, and they impose levies on blank media of SEK0.0025 per megabyte
for recordable discs and SEK0.007 for re-recordable discs.
This move by the Swedish government comes after a long and bitter battle over
copyright issues within the country, and after the European Commission
threatened
Sweden with fines for not adopting the EUCD into its copyright law.
It also came a week after Sweden's young Justice Minister, Thomas Bodström,
threatened
to ban CD copy protection technology in the country because it denies consumers'
rights under Swedish law (like that of most other European Union countries) to
make personal copies of media.
With these moves, Sweden has chosen to focus on legal and financial means, as
opposed to technological means, of inhibiting technologically-supported
infringement. The prohibition on illegal downloading is the
converse of law that Canada
established in
late 2003, which found uploaders liable while absolving downloaders.
The Canadian law seems more sensible, because uploaders ought to have a better
idea of whether their content is authorized or not, whereas there is no easy general way
for a consumer to tell whether a download is legit or not.
What we find
more objectionable about Sweden's new laws are the levies on blank media.
They are so high as to be punitive: for example, the levy on a recordable CD
will be SEK 1.75 or US $0.24, thereby almost doubling its typical price.
This is even higher than in Canada, a hotbed of blank media levies, where the
uplift is CAD 0.21 (US $0.16), which is more like a 50% surcharge.
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