New Swedish law to ban downloading of films, music

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden's parliament approved a law on Wednesday that bans the downloading of copyrighted material such as films and music from the Internet after being singled out for criticism by Hollywood.

Sweden had until now allowed downloading of files, while uploading, or putting material on the Web, was illegal.

Actor
Morgan Freeman, in a Reuters interview, recently cited Sweden as an example of a country where illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing was a growing problem.

The Swedish parliament's decision, which comes into effect July 1, aims to change that.

"The decision means that a clear ban has been introduced against downloading music, pictures and other material on the Internet for private use without the copyright holder's permission," parliament said in a statement.

Anyone breaking the law can be ordered to pay damages.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents the U.S. film industry, had in March hailed a raid by police on a company hosting Internet servers as a major blow against piracy in Sweden.

The MPAA said the authorities seized four computer servers -- one reputed to be the biggest pirate server in Europe -- containing enough digital film and music content for up to 3-1/2 years of uninterrupted play, the organization said.

It added that authorities in Scandinavian countries had been reluctant to take such action in the past.

The MPAA says the film industry loses $3.5 billion a year to videotapes and DVDs sold on the black market, but it has no estimate for how much Internet piracy costs the industry.

The new Swedish law allows people to make one copy of a CD for personal use and to make copies of newspaper articles.

< This is from where EI draws it's concept of retroactive law. If a law was valid in the first place, it should always be, and vice versa. Sweeden just criminalized a whole shitload of it's citizens. For this to happen is about as far from what's right and good as possible. In cases where something depends in particular on a specific changable event or fact, it can be written in as an exception to retroactivity, but this will be rare. >