
Swiss Copyright Law: Downloading Stays Legal, No Site Blocking - vezycash
https://torrentfreak.com/swiss-copyright-law-downloading-stays-legal-no-site-blocking/
======
ddelt
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.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
5\. Torrents are more convenient.

I was happy to and still do pay for Netflix. But occasionally something comes
along and I’m sure as hell not subscribing to 5 extra streaming services. One
or two? Maybe even three? But now you have Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV
along with the other regional streaming services if you want to get content
legally. And there’s more services to come.

~~~
cercatrova
Unfortunately, any aggregator service suffers the tragedy of the commons. At
first it's nice because one place has all of the content. As time goes by,
each provider of content sees that they could make more money by removing
their content from the aggregator and launching their own service. This is
true if it occurs in a vacuum, but it inevitably doesn't; each content
provider thinks similarly and creates their own service. Now the consumer does
not want to pay for each service and will resort to the most convenient
option, piracy. If you follow gaming news, you see this happen with regards to
Steam and the Epic Games Store. Piracy is a nearly unbeatable service because
it acts as the ultimate aggregator with unremovable content. (Yes, there are
private tracker sites with their own selection of content, but the vast
majority of people use public trackers.)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The thing they don't seem to understand is that you don't get long-term
subscribers from the back catalog. It's the new content.

Which means what they should be doing is reserving the latest season to
themselves but making it so that everything else is available everywhere
(assuming reciprocity). Then when season one drops on Netflix and Netflix
subscribers like it, well, season two is out but only on Disney for the next
year. And the customer might actually be willing to drop Netflix for Disney
this year _if_ they both have the same back catalog, when it wouldn't be worth
it if you have to subscribe to both at once for that.

The result would be that a customer could get all content by subscribing to
only one service and no piracy, but only if they're willing to be a year out
of date for most of it, which still allows them to get multiple subscriptions
from the subset of people with more disposable income. And it's not as if they
don't make any money from licensing the old seasons to the other providers --
or make any money when the other providers license their old seasons to them
and allow them to get more subscribers.

Their problem is they're overvaluing exclusivity for old content.

~~~
birdyrooster
I’m not sure you’ve seen Netflix’s dwindling catalog, but they are very aware
of this phenomenon and have been pivoting away from deep catalog to originals
since at least 2012. I remember once a VP said in all hands, “our plan is to
become HBO before HBO becomes us”

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Their dwindling catalog is the result of the other services thinking that
removing their old content from Netflix will help them. But nobody is going to
subscribe to a different service just so they can do a one-time watch of a
series that has been on Pirate Bay for five years, so all those companies are
really doing is depriving themselves of the money Netflix would have paid them
to license that series.

~~~
CriticalCathed
What about the super-series content? netflix just purchased the rights to
Seinfeld for example -- probably for an insane amount of money. Or The Office
which is leaving netflix in a few years.

Those probably drive new users and retain current ones.

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m000
> ...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
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
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
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.

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microtherion
> 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.

~~~
xwolfi
That's the raw definition of freedom: your freedom stops where the freedom of
others starts.

You're free to give passports to war criminals to flee to Argentina, we're
free to require Credit Suisse to give us their list of european clients if
they want to operate in european markets.

Everyone is free in the best of worlds, long live free Switzerland.

~~~
afiori
> That's the raw definition of freedom: your freedom stops where the freedom
> of others starts.

This does not really apply here; the meaning here applies to freedom as a
right from an authority (being this a state or an abstract morality). The
freedom Switzerland has is not constrained from that[1] but it is constrained
by the responsibility they have towards their own population.

[1] Ok, above the state of Switzerland there is the Swiss population. But that
does not really have an impact here.

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CaptainZapp
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-
med...](https://www.suisa.ch/en/customers/levy-for-blank-storage-media.html)

edit : typo

~~~
chris_engel
So because you _could_ copy illegally, the tax is taken?

Thats like putting a tax on cars because they might be used in a heist. Or a
tax on weapons because there might be murder...

~~~
cf141q5325
Those taxes are no fines but the fees to allow you to make private copies of
copyrighted work. Not a bad idea until private copies were made illegal by
introducing laws to circumvent copy protection. Today the tax is just a giant
"Screw you, because we can" in most countries who still have it.

------
mnm1
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
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
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
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
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.

------
huhtenberg
> _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/)

~~~
n1000
Yes, _but_ Swiss ISPs are not allowed to share their client's data as far as I
know. So there is no way to prosecute. As I said in my other comment, I know
people that received the copyright claim letters from foreign institutions
"for information" from their ISP.

~~~
raxxorrax
That is an incredibly well thought out legislation. If you ever try to conquer
the comparably rotten and sad chunk of land that calls itself EU, just know
you have supporters.

------
PostOnce
50 year copyright term extended to 70 years

~~~
aequitas
70 years _after_ the author's death.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths)

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
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.

~~~
nothrabannosir
_> 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 deem it unfair that the family of a rich person gets anything at all,
through inheritance or otherwise, so my answer would be yes.

~~~
eteos
Whats wrong with inheritance? It is a big drive for economy. Or is it just
that you don't like rich people?

~~~
rocqua
The argument against inheritance is one based on meritocracy.

Specifically, the idea is that money should be gained based on how useful you
are to society. Being the child of someone who was rich does not automatically
mean you are useful to society. Hence, by this argument, it should not
automatically mean you get to have your parents money.

~~~
bzbarsky
This presupposes that all money, and in general all resources, including
labor, belongs to the state (or society) except that which is explicitly
allowed to people.

While that is a coherent point of view, it has some really unpalatable
implications. The first one is that the assumption that society owns
everyone's labor until proven otherwise is a great justification for various
forms of effective slavery. The second one is that taking your "useful to
society" statement at face value leads to things like the eugenics movements
of the early 20th century, withholding (or confiscating) resources from those
deemed "useless" to society, etc.

But even within this framework, making more money than you spend corresponds
to producing more resources for society's benefit than you consume, and
thereby building up a sort of "social credit". You then draw on this credit
later in life (e.g. in retirement). It seems like the main claim you are
making regarding inheritance is that this sort of social credit should not be
transferable, right?

But that raises the question of whether people be able to give gifts to
someone else at all. In this framework the answer is basically "no", because
that would represent a transfer of the non-transferable social credit. But if
they _should_, then should there be a substantive difference between a gift
given 10 minutes before someone has a heart attack and receiving the same gift
20 minutes later? From an ethical point of view, I have a hard time with there
being a difference between those two cases.

~~~
Matumio
You can also earn money just by inheriting a large pile and hiring someone who
manages it. Or work for someone who did that. Contributing to society at large
is entirely optional for some people.

It's not a problem when someone inherits a sum that can be earned within an
average person's lifetime. It's the proportions. A single person should not
inherit the right over several thousand lifetimes of work output.

No, it's not better when "the state" or "society" decides as a group where
this work output should be directed instead. But that's not the only
alternative. When someone argues against inheritance using the "meritocracy"
argument, I don't think this implies that people who would have worked for the
heir's money should instead work on a project that all members of society have
sanctioned.

~~~
bzbarsky
> You can also earn money just by inheriting a large pile and hiring someone
> who manages it.

Just to be clear, in this situation what is going on is that you are holding
the right to call on some resources (i.e. money) but are not exercising that
right immediately. What you are doing instead is letting others use your right
to get the resources they want now, with the understanding that in the future
they will give you more resources. The "let others make use of resources that
you can call on but don't need right now" part is in fact a _very_ useful
social function; someone doing that is in fact contributing to society.
Whether and how much they should be compensated for that is a good question,
and I am open to arguments that the typical compensation for it is too high
compared to the social utility of the activity.

And of course the exponential growth aspect makes things unsustainable over
the long run here: people can't promise you more resources in the future
indefinitely in the real world, though they have been able to do that for the
last few centuries for various reasons. In conditions prior to that, here were
various attempts at mechanisms for avoiding this exponential growth problem
(e.g. the jubilee system described in the Bible is an interesting example of
attempting to address the issue).

> A single person should not inherit the right over several thousand lifetimes
> of work output

Should a single person earn such a right to start with? In some cases, I'd
think maybe: consider someone who saved society thousands of lifetimes of work
effort in some way, e.g. via an invention. But I feel that this is an
interesting question to ask as a baseline. Once we posit that someone _can_
own that much right-to-output, we're back to whether people can gift it and
under what conditions...

> When someone argues against inheritance using the "meritocracy" argument, I
> don't think this implies that people who would have worked for the heir's
> money should instead work on a project that all members of society have
> sanctioned.

It seems like the basic options for dealing with inheritances are:

1) Some individual or group gets the money. This is inheritance as normally
understood. This is the thing being argued against on "meritocracy" grounds
above, afaict.

2) Society at large (the government) gets the money. This is estate taxes as
normally understood, and corresponds to the "work on a project that all
members of society have sanctioned" option.

3) The money just disappears. That is, there is effectively debt forgiveness
for whoever owed money to the person who died. If they held cash, that would
be the Federal Reserve. If they had bank accounts, that would be the relevant
banks. If they held bonds, it's the bond issuer. For stocks maybe you can
effectively "un-dilute" the other stockholders, sort of like a 0-price
buyback. I have no idea what the real estate equivalent of this would be, or
the equivalent for goods someone owns (books, clothes, furniture, piles of
grain, etc).

I'm not thinking of other options so far, but open to ideas on what other
options would be.

It seems to me that one glaring flaw with option (3) is that it can be
converted to option (1) with some planning: if the main assets you hold at
death are IOUs from people and such IOUs get canceled at death, then you can
just carefully choose who owes you money and they end up effectively
inheriting it. It's a lot less flexible from just holding whatever assets you
want and then having a will, but for the really large fortunes it would not be
difficult to structure it to be equivalent, I suspect, modulo the extent to
which the "heirs" have control over the money before they come into their
inheritance.

The basic issue with (3) is that it fundamentally doesn't _cancel_ the right-
to-output; it just transfers it to someone else, still. I haven't been able to
think of a good way so far to actually _destroy_ such a right, but I am not an
expert in this area and haven't spent _that_ much time thinking about it.

------
n1000
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.

------
abc03
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.

------
malthaus
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
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
So, Netflix shows are good because of the corporatocracy..

And it's not okay to like Netflix shows if you wish the US wasn't a
corporatocracy...

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

------
dstola
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

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pjc50
Back in the day, this was why lyrics.ch was hosted in Switzerland.

------
shmerl
Good push against copyright maximalists.

