from Hacker News

Crazy new Swedish bill makes sharing music and TV as bad a “crime” as manslaughter

by finnn on 2/23/18, 6:23 AM with 68 comments

• by blunte on 2/23/18, 9:23 AM

  I don't know Swedish law, but I will guess that like American law, any parliament/house member can introduce basically any bill saying anything. Presumably the bill will not pass if it's terrible and the other members are sane/not-corrupt. So the presence of this bill is unfortunate, but I doubt it would get passed.

  The money in politics problem has been increasing in much of the development world, so we have seen corporate interest laws pushed and often passed. The US of course is one of the worst offenders of this, and unfortunately this corporate-government system has been spreading to Europe and Scandinavia.

  Fortunately for the world, the current US political circus has finally become so absurd that the global corporate right wing spread has slowed (based on elections in the last year). Maybe it will reverse once thinking populations finally realize the outcomes of the non-public-serving policies that their corrupt politicians have been pushing.

  Yes this all sounds a bit dramatic, but there really aren't other adequate words to describe the direction of politics in the last 20-30 years. It really has been a problem of corporate money in politics, and it snuck up on "the people". But eventually the results begin to show, whether by excessive gun violence, increasing financial deficits (think "Kansas/Brownback"), perpetual wars, increasing first world poverty, etc. The absurdity reaches a point where it impacts enough of the comfortable people that they start caring what their politicians are actually doing, and then you start seeing big turnovers and upheavals as we're starting to see in US states now.

• by INTPenis on 2/23/18, 8:12 AM

  I'm not surprised when I see on swedish news how a pedophile gets 3-4 years for molesting hundreds of children and a bank robber gets 5-8 years for not hurting a single person but stealing millions.

  It's a long standing dark gag here that financial crime is being treated much worse than violent crime.

• by AnnoyingSwede on 2/23/18, 9:55 AM

  Comparing this to a bank-robbery doesn't really scale, being two completely different crimes. However, this suggestion came at the same time as the Swedish government suggested raised penalties for weapon crimes, meaning you can get up to 4 years for carrying a automatic weapon/hand-grenade you are not licensed for while you can receive a 6 year for providing copyrighted material to the public. Common punishment for rape in Sweden is 1-2 years. It's clear to me the Swedish government are not helping Hollywood in the best interest of it's citizen's but due to lobbying from the film industry. Just my 5 cents.

• by some_account on 2/23/18, 7:56 AM

  Ever seen the movie Idiocracy? I feel like society is becoming more and more like that. Laws like these are being passed and people are too numb to care.

• by sq_ on 2/23/18, 8:05 AM

  Attempts at this type of legislation make me almost irrationally angry.

  This is a quote from the article that the PIA post linked to (translated from Swedish by Google so wording may be slightly off):

  "Today there is an organized online piracy that has major consequences for the whole community. Therefore, it is good that the punishment crimes for these crimes have been overlooked as the sanction is proportional to the seriousness of the crime"

  I just fail to understand how someone causing a multi-million/billion dollar media corporation to lose some money is a crime so serious that that person should be imprisoned for up to six years.

• by rotorblade on 2/23/18, 9:18 AM

  This, [0], appears to be the conclusion of the investigation that resulted in the bill, which contains a suggestion for a law.

  [0] (Swedish) http://www.sou.gov.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/SOU-2018_6_...

• by brisance on 2/23/18, 9:23 AM

  This is frankly surprising to me. Didn’t the Pirate Party win seats in the Swedish parliament? What happened to them?

• by yuhong on 2/24/18, 12:26 AM

  Thinking about it, part of the reasons music labels got big is for economy of scale when mass producing CDs for example. Of course, such economy of scale was not needed anymore with the move to digital distribution. This didn't work well with the current debt-based economy where shareholders depends on stocks always going up for things like retirements and companies treat people as "consumers" to be extracted from. I assume that Hollywood has similar problems, right?

• by RickJWag on 2/24/18, 2:13 AM

  In a just world, any musician, actor or artist that 'steals' time from an audience to espouse political opinions should be subject to unlimited free file-sharing of their content.

  Yes, I like that idea.

• by staticelf on 2/23/18, 9:36 AM

  As a swede, I am unfortunately not surprised. While we have a surge in violent crimes mainly due to mass immigration this kind of shit gets pushed.

  When I was young, explosions and gang criminality were extremely rare and uncommon but today it is unfortunately being more common. I have several friends, including me, that has been the victim of either threats or violence in the recent years but the perpetrators always walks free due to our incompetent police and justice system that doesn't even investigate even the most obvious crimes where the perpetrator is known.

  Some examples:

  - My uncle was beaten down and had to be in the hospital for tring to stop 3 people from stealing a bike. No further investigation.

  - I am/was being threatned several times by a guy, which I reported to the police several times and they haven't even started to look at my case yet (this was several months ago). I am very certain that the preliminary investigation will be canceled.

  - Several sexual crimes towards children isn't even being investigated due to "heavy work burden" [1]

  The development is really pissing me off and I am even thinking about moving from Sweden since I often times don't feel secure anymore. If this bill gets through it is simply more proof how insane our politicians are. They don't give any reason to believe that they even care the slightest about civilians security, just the image of the country as a whole. This kind of legislation will be used in the same way the drug policies are used, they increase the statistics for the police to make it look like they solve a bunch of crimes when in reality they do not solve most crimes of importance.

  [1]: https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=...