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Originally Posted by Mazer
Realistically, will copyright be completly removed from Sweedish law, or will they simply reduce the copyright terms and infringement penalties?
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It's too early to estimate yet what parts of their agenda the pirates might get through should they manage to march to the parliament.
Here's what they demand anyway:
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The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.
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So for the sake of this thought experiment, let's assume that this part of the agenda would go through, and the Swedish artists would be able to use non-commercially everything from day one and commercially anything at least five years old. Let's also assume that what you say about the situation elsewhere...
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Sweden is a signatory to four international copyright treaties, including the Berne convention and the Rome convention. These treaties require a term of protection lasting for at least lifetime of the author, producer, or performer of the recording plus 50 years, but they give Sweden the ability to make exceptions for specific uses of copyrighted material. If the Swedes want to change their law to give citizens the right to sample copyrighted songs for commercial use then they may do so, but that exception will not extend beyond Sweden's borders.
To my knowledge there are no compulsory licensing laws that apply to music samples, so I would expect that if such a compilation as you're describing were to be produced in Sweden and published abroad that the producer of that mash-up would be legally liable in the other countries that have signed those treaties. And should she visit one of those nations she would be subject to arrest and trial for her crimes, such as happened to Dmitry Sklyarov when he visited the United States. Furthermore, these other nations might decide to censor the mash-up and bar it from sale or broadcast until the proper license fees are paid.
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...would apply.
Say we have a hypothetical Swedish composer Lena Svensson who has a fascination for modern soundworlds. She has already used all sorts of modern sounds in her critically acclaimed sound collages and welcomes the new more liberal law that finally gives her legal access also to use modern music recordings as one of the brushes in her audio palette. As she makes part of her living selling signed copies of her self-released albums to her fans, she decides to respect the 5 year protection time, just in case. Then she starts to work on and release all sorts of fancy sound collages with musical elements sampled from anything released anywhere up to year 2001. Audience receives her works well, enjoying the smart way she references modern pop culture with actual samples from well-known contemporary works. And so she gets not only more fans but also musical followers, giving birth to a new subgenre of electronic music known as 'Free Swedish'. In February 2007 TV5, the French culture channel, would award her with a prize for the best album of the year.
Would TV5 be able to play her album?
Would she risk being arrested if she went to Paris to pick up her prize?
Further...
Say we have a hypotethical American composer Jack Jazzy who likes obscure Scandinavian stuff and has downloaded all Lena Svensson's albums from Pirate Bay. Lena Svensson released all her albums under a Creative Commons license in Sweden and put them up on Pirate Bay herself for anybody to take. Did Jack commit a crime by downloading them?
Jack as a composer immediately falls in love with the 'Free Swedish' style and decides to compose some 'Free Swedish' himself. And so he comes up with a great new album of that genre. Would there be any place on the planet where he could release the album without having to fear about the consequences?