Kaws Darth Vader Companion via Original Fake

Today the war on piracy stepped up a notch in both Germany and Sweden. In Berlin this morning, Germany’s upper house of parliament rubber-stamped an incredibly tough new copyright law, which makes it practically illegal for individuals in Germany to make copies of films and music, even if just for their own use.

According to Variety, “Consumer groups and the Green Party had campaigned in vain to include a “bagatelle exemption,” so that the measure would not “criminalize” youths and other private users. The law is set to take effect in 2008.

“The law goes beyond previous legislation brought in by the German government to help the entertainment industry. Germany’s federal justice minister Brigitte Zypris claimed that the legislative reform brought German law into line with European Union codes.”

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Said Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing, “Nice going, Germany — between this and the new anti-hacker laws, you’ve managed to criminalize every productive member of the information society. Enjoy the caves and flint axes.”

Meanwhile over in Sweden, The Pirate Bay struck back against the media companies it claims are deliberately hacking and sabotaging its trackers.

A post that went up today says: “Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we’ve been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.

“While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.”

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