The Swiss Confederation

Copyright revision 2006 explained

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The following problems have been spotted by FFII in the current proposal of the copyright revision:

Overruling of the right to share a private copy with a closed group of friends

The current copyright grants every consumer the right to share a private copy of any works with a limited set of friends. The only condition to this is that the number of people receiving it is limited and every receipient must be known personally.

The EU Copyright Directive (EUCD) keeps this tradition up by stating that everyone may face sanctions if they make a protected work available to members of the public space from locations and to times of their choice using any tool. However, in the swiss version, the notion of members of the public space has been replaced by persons, which does not exclude the circle of close friends from illegality. This prohibits the previously legal neighborhood music sharing et cetra.

Overruling of the right to a private copy

The current copyright grants everybody the right to create a copy of the works he owns for backup purposes. Due to the fact that most storage media tend to become unreadable after some amount of time, this is a reasonable thing to ask.

The revised copyright, however, might take away this freedom. It is stated that all circumventions of copyright protection mechanisms constitute a criminal act. Creating a backup of the works, however, does require a circumvention of the copyright protection mechanism per se, because it involves copying the works.

Impossibility to do scientific research on cryptography and other protection mechanisms

Impossibility to archive works

Impossibility to make works perceptible to disabled people