Swoxx
CAGiversary!
Fellow CAG's, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this!
So basically IPRED went into effect today in Sweden.
In short, IPRED is a EU-Directive which was optional to implement. It gives the Copyright-lobby the ability to make private investigations into people downloading and uploading pirated material. They have more authority than the actual Swedish Police does now. All they need is a screen-capitation of your IP "leeching / seeding" something which is protected under copyright.
They can then proceed to make contact with your ISP, demand info on the person behind the IP, which now the ISP's are forced to give out (The swedish police does not have this authority). Then they are free to send demand-letters to this person telling the individual to pay the fines within 30 days, or they will take you to court. If you loose you have to pay thier legal fees and fines, and either way you will have to pay for your own.
Now this wouldn't be that bad if the fees were reasonal. This legislation is not controlled by one of Swedish legislation's groundrules, saying that you can only demand reimbursts of actual losses, the foundation for this law gives the industries the ability to set thier own fines based on the industries interest that this is not repeated.
So, from experiences from Denmark, the fines are usually in the thousands and tens of thousands dollars, enough to seriously screw up your life and possibly make you seriously in debt, for just a few movies or songs.
Ofcourse i don't think piracy should be legal, and it should be prevented. But this means that you can recive one of these demand-letters even if you've never done anything, if your wireless network gets hacked and someone downloads from it, you may get this letter, and you will have to go to court with it, but most people just pay right away out of fear.
The problems with this legislation is also the fact that the file-sharing has grown to be something of an accepted youth-culture, atleast in Europe, and they've done nothing against it for several years, allowing it to get to this. I feel that you cant go from nothing to throwing down the iron fist with insane fine's.
So, what do you think about this?
Cheers
Swoxx
So basically IPRED went into effect today in Sweden.
In short, IPRED is a EU-Directive which was optional to implement. It gives the Copyright-lobby the ability to make private investigations into people downloading and uploading pirated material. They have more authority than the actual Swedish Police does now. All they need is a screen-capitation of your IP "leeching / seeding" something which is protected under copyright.
They can then proceed to make contact with your ISP, demand info on the person behind the IP, which now the ISP's are forced to give out (The swedish police does not have this authority). Then they are free to send demand-letters to this person telling the individual to pay the fines within 30 days, or they will take you to court. If you loose you have to pay thier legal fees and fines, and either way you will have to pay for your own.
Now this wouldn't be that bad if the fees were reasonal. This legislation is not controlled by one of Swedish legislation's groundrules, saying that you can only demand reimbursts of actual losses, the foundation for this law gives the industries the ability to set thier own fines based on the industries interest that this is not repeated.
So, from experiences from Denmark, the fines are usually in the thousands and tens of thousands dollars, enough to seriously screw up your life and possibly make you seriously in debt, for just a few movies or songs.
Ofcourse i don't think piracy should be legal, and it should be prevented. But this means that you can recive one of these demand-letters even if you've never done anything, if your wireless network gets hacked and someone downloads from it, you may get this letter, and you will have to go to court with it, but most people just pay right away out of fear.
The problems with this legislation is also the fact that the file-sharing has grown to be something of an accepted youth-culture, atleast in Europe, and they've done nothing against it for several years, allowing it to get to this. I feel that you cant go from nothing to throwing down the iron fist with insane fine's.
So, what do you think about this?
Cheers
Swoxx