Swiss DMCA Quietly Adopted 137
roady writes "We have seen a lot of talk over the years about the Canadian DMCA. But few know about the Swiss version recently adopted by law makers ... not even the Swiss people.
The government and media have been very quiet, probably to avoid a referendum. Indeed, Switzerland is a direct democracy and if 50,000 citizens sign a referendum, the whole country will have a chance to vote against the new copyright law. In this version of the DMCA, sharing a file on P2P networks will land you one year in jail, even though the law mandates a levy on blank media. The history of the law is available online."
Levy on Media? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wth.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop supporting the same old bullshit by not voting democrat or republican? That's my guess.
swiss slashdot readers (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:wth.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem becomes numbers of people that need to be involved.
though America's democracy is in need of overhaul. eliminating the electoral college is a start. term limits would be a solid second. Politicains shouldn't be a life time job, but a temp job, maybe a decade or so of service.
Re:Thank you (Score:3, Insightful)
The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. ~Lao-tzu
Re:In all seriousness... (Score:3, Insightful)
What stops the US from having viable third parties is our election method (plurality voting). If we had proportional representation, where getting 5% of the votes means your party automatically gets 5% of the seats in Congress, or if we used approval voting or ranked choice voting within each district instead of plurality, then third parties might actually have a chance.
Plurality voting the way we run it encourages strategic voting that hurts smaller parties. In other words, even if you truly prefer the third-party candidate, your policy interests are better served by voting for the more acceptable one of the two major-party candidates; the system punishes you for voting for a candidate who's unlikely to win. See Duverger's law [wikipedia.org].
Re:Can some Swiss citizens enlighten us (Score:5, Insightful)
1: "Suisse". If you're talking English, you meant "Swiss".
2: CHF Gold backing: It's true the Swiss franc lost some of it's gold backing in 2000, but (other than, for example, the US Dollar) it's value seems solid as a rock in a moving sea of global currencies. An inflation of some 1% (according to your(?) governmental factbook [cia.gov]) supports this as well as Yahoo! data on exchange rates [yahoo.com].
About that bank panics idea of yours: Remember the all-american Subprime Mortgage Crisis? Some swiss banks lost a few billion on it, some lower management positions will need to be restaffed, high management seems largely unchanged, the general public wasn't concerned at all. How well did british [wikipedia.org] and american [wikipedia.org] banks [wikipedia.org] cope with it?
3: Disarmament: As opposed to some nation in the far west, a majority of Swiss people seems to be slowly realizing the idiocy of maintaining an overproportional army while surrounded by allied and politically stable countries. With a very recent incident of an army recruit shooting some girl he didn't even know out of the blue, abolishing the forced armament seems nearer than ever. There's no debate about prohibiting guns completely, merely talks about safely storing army equipment outside of individuals' homes. By the way: just a few months ago, in what probably is a first step in the disarmament, soldiers are no longer equipped with any ammo to take home with 'em.
I realize that such events need to be put into perspective (during the writing of this post more people died of hunger than were killed by Swiss army weapons in the last decades), but if an action (forced armament) does not cause any good and very few deaths, it's still a stupid thing to do.