2014-01-14 My Favorite Swiss Copyright Exception

Almost every country has some exceptions to copyright law. You need those in order for a modern society to work. In the US, it is called Fair Use. In Switzerland, the exceptions are listed in the copyright act itself. My favorite of these is *for personal use*. In other words, you are allowed to make copies of protected works for personal use. You are not allowed to distribute copies to strangers on the Internet, but amongst friends and family, copying is OK. In fact, you *pay a tax* on all consumer goods on which copies can be stored in order to remunerate authors. Empty tapes (remember those?), blank CDs, iPods and other MP3 players, hard disks... all of these are more expensive because of this tax. In return, you are allowed to copy things from friends and family. This is great. 👌

Fair Use

This is URG Art. 19 Verwendung zum Eigengebrauch.

URG Art. 19 Verwendung zum Eigengebrauch

Yesterday I was talking to a friend* about a PDF for a game one of us might possibly have and he said he wouldn’t mind sharing with us since we were only going to play it once or twice. I was confused and explained that it was perfectly legal for him to share it with us. He laughed and said “but, you know, on *moral* grounds...” I was even more confused. Apparently the constant propaganda of the recording associations, of the movie associations, of the various collecting societies had already convinced him that he was doing something wrong *even though it was perfectly legal and even though he had paid for the right to do it*. 👎

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Anyway, yesterday the EFF started Copyright Week “talking about key principles that should guide copyright policy.” Sounds good to me!

EFF

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Remember how the Swiss government said in 2011 that there was no need to change copyright. Most significantly: *there was no need to criminalize downloads for personal use.* This was around the time of SOPA and NDAA. Sad panda times. And they just won’t stop. In 2012 the government decided to create a commission to investigate the need for reform and in 2013 they delivered a report. On Twitter, @olknz sent me a link to a discussion of the AGUR12 results (the German “Abschlussbericht”). It has some recommendations which look mostly helpless (IP and DNS blocks, best effort to not overblock, make sure there’s legal recourse), the need to inform the public about its rights (my point when I started writing this post), a general inability to adapt to the future of e-books (failing to see how and why the future is being dominated by Google, Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble, all of them US companies).

SOPA and NDAA

the AGUR12 results

It’s a good read, if you read German. Thanks, Oliver Kunz.