Swiss Internet Piracy Laws? How Strict?

Tech, TV, Mobile, Internet and Geek Corner
1
Alright, so I was reading over my lease contract, and internet is supplied by the landlord. It says explicitly that: "The use of internet is under the sole responsibility of the tenant who must abide by the laws applicable."

I don't know about Switzerland, but in USA, they have extremely strict piracy laws. Teenagers getting fined millions of dollars for downloading a couple songs and grown adults being prosecuted for streaming a movie online.

Let's say, if I happened to go online to watch movies or download songs in Switzerland, should I be as worried as if I was living in USA?

2
This is a good question. My colleague told me it isn't illegal to download in Switzerland, but it is illegal to file share.

Based on your query, I wonder if he is right or wrong

3
you can download movies without any worry but you must not upload.. its been covered before and with a few links to the applicable law in the threads.

also note that a while ago a company was collecting IP data of suspected file leechers - they were told to stop and destroy all data by the authorities due to privacy laws

4
what's wrong with uploading if they're gonna allow downloading? weird.

what do you mean by file "leeching?"

5
How does this work in practice, given that most bit torrent clients both download and upload at the same time?

6
you can stop the upload from happening... to date, someone in my neighborhood has been allowing the upload to happen... i tried to discourage such practice, but you know, when the left shoulder tells the right shoulder to butt out, its hard for the right shoulder to say anything other than thank you

7
Point 1. Seems weird I know, but apparently it's based on the premise that it's unreasonable to expect you to know exactly what you're downloading until it's downloaded. With uploading you know exactly what you're uploading. Yep, OK, it's still weird.

Point 2. Leeching. A leech is somebody who downloads, but does not upload. Therefore if you want to remain totally legal in Switzerland then you'll have be a leech.

It works fine in practice as most torrent clients will allow you to throttle the uploads right back to either zero (Transmission will allow this) or to a rate that is so slow that nobody will get anything useful from you during the download period.

8
Tonino, BitTorrent is not the only option for what you're talking about. There are plenty of sites, and newsgroups (if you want to go old school), which offer files for download only - no uploading involved.

9
Kim Schmidz (German) was just put in Jail (CEO of Megaupload) . In CH for personal use, if you can find something to download and use it yourself my experience is no one cares. Like all over, if you do not own content, and you upload it for others to use, this is illegal, and all jurisdictions are strict.

10
Everybody told me the same here: "you can download but you cannot upload". I talked about these issues with a friend who is a lawyer and he told me that you can also upload, but not the whole file. This way you are sharing something "useless". :P

So, if you adjust your upload ratio to your download speed, you can share without any problem (as Slaphead said).

11
Mrs Scotney recently had to write a lengthy essay outlining the current situation regarding copywrite and the law in Switzerland, so this is kind of a hot topic for us.

In easy terms, the current situation is as so ;

Under current Swiss law, you are permitted to download music, films, games etc , copy it and distribute to people, provided you do not sell the copied material for money. Swiss law at the moment views this as normal and reasonable part of promoting a product or service, therefore is deemed legal under the Swiss freedom of information act - at the moment.

The logic being mainly related to Scientific (esp Chemical) research and the accessibility of information. Music, films, games and other products come under the same umbrella of 'free information / material'

However, there is much pressure being put on the Swiss Authorities from the US & UK Governments and Copywrite agencies, for the Swiss to fall in line with the rest of Global Copywrite Policy. The Swiss are standing their ground at the moment and refusing to consider changing their policy, however with the kind of (mainly US) companies like AOL at the forefront of prosecuting nationals from outside their own borders, there is pressure to reach a compromise in the future.

While my understanding is based on research in the past 6 months, I have read many news stories from around the world where people have been extradited to the US for trial. Pretty much all the worlds servers and service providers are US owned , including torrent sites , and are located on US territory.

As such you may not be committing a 'crime' in Switzerland, but the fact a US server or provider is part of the chain you use, the American authorities view this as a crime committed on their territory. Hence their zeal in prosecuting people for copying Lady Gaga (e.g.) albums and giving it to their kid sister as a gift.

I would like to say at this stage, I am not a copywrite lawyer and this is only research I / we have conducted for academic purposes. If you get a knock on your door from the FBI, I didn't tell you any of this

Scotney x

12
Isn't that akin to being able to own dope but not distribute it?

13
While using some of the P2P software you might also want to consider simultaneously running PeerBlock http://www.peerblock.com/ (ex-PeerGuardian) whose sole purpose is to block known spying IP addresses e.g. hackers, goverments, universities, anti-P2P etc.

However, I'm not sure this software will prevent your IP address from being collected by anti-P2P companies, to the best of my knowledge it will prevent them from connecting to your computer via P2P but they might still be able to see and collect your IP address.

14
I just did some very quick googling (if that is a word) and found out that the Computer Engineering Lab at Zurich have a project called bitthief - this allows the user to set upload to zero, and download to your heart's content.

This is officially legal here in CH, as far as I know....

...now the only problem is that the "trackers" somehow look out to see if the downloaders are sharing any files. So the upshot is that some files work for torrent downloads, others do not (the whole point of torrents is that people share, otherwise the system does not work).

...ironically off to the cinema now to see the movie that I am trying to (legally) download! Let's see if it works!!

15

It sure is

http://searchenginewatch.com/article...ish-Dictionary

16

as its legal to download and IP tracking companies are not allowed to operate due to privacy laws whats the point of peerblock?

17
Good point, there is only one way to find out.

Get and run PeerBlock and you might be surprised to see how many IP tracking companies are still tracking you ... though they are not allowed to operate locally here in Switzerland, this restriction will not apply to those outside Switzerland. IP tracking companies outside Switzerland can and will still "see you".

18
It's not weird, it's called private use and you pay for your private use with various copyright fees on almost every hardware able to copy and/or store data (including optical media, Internet connections, hard drives, MP3 players, copy machines and –soon –smart phones).

19

true, but i always question how accurate the database is... its a false sense of security.

20
very true tapioca, im really scared the bad man will come and ask questions