Are Swedish Police Violating Copyright Law In Creating Shoe Database?

from the if-the-shoe-fits dept

Thu, Sep 9th 2010 11:41am — Mike Masnick

Sweden has certainly been an interesting country to watch on copyright issues. Home of The Pirate Bay, the original Pirate Party, and an awful lot of people who seem to feel pretty strongly that copyright law is out of control, there are still plenty of Swedes who feel the opposite way and support stronger copyright law. It often appears that law enforcement in Sweden is strongly aligned with those interests, working hard to prosecute The Pirate Bay and having staff members that seem to jump back and forth between the police department and the entertainment industry.

So, it's a bit amusing to find out that the Swedish National Police may be in a bit of hot water themselves after building a national "shoe database" (Google translation from the original Swedish) for use in tracking what kinds of shoes make what kinds of tracks. But how did they build the database? They just went online and downloaded pictures from various websites.

And it turns out that might not be legal.

The police claim that the law lets them ignore copyright in solving crimes, but an intellectual property professor quoted in the article notes that such an exemption only applies in the direct police investigation of a specific crime -- not for the sake of building up a general database. The professor suggests that this appears to be a clear violation of Swedish copyright laws.

While I do think it's silly that this should be considered infringement (a database of shoe treads? really?), I do find it amusing when organizations that always promote themselves as strongly pro-copyright discover how that can come back to bite them.

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Filed Under: copyright, sweden

20 Comments

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Hephaestus (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 11:49am

Talk about tripping themselves up ....
thats a kick in the pants ....
man they are being given the boot ....
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Dark Helmet (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 11:53am

Re: Talk about tripping themselves up ....
I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop....
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Malak (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 12:13pm

This is such a well-heeled argument I doubt it will have any trouble getting traction.
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Dark Helmet (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 12:52pm

Re:
Don't tread where you don't belong, Malak. This discussion is laced up with tension.

Sigh, I shouldn't be this mean. I must have no sole....
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Richard (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 12:57pm

As always
The supporters of strong copyright assume it doesn't apply to them!
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Berenerd (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 1:16pm

Damn you dark helmet....
I started laughing too loud and now everyone in the server room is staring at me....*shakes fist in defiance*
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Joe Kicks, 9 Sep 2010 @ 1:23pm

As a somewhat serious aside
You can copyright a tread?

I can get trademarking, even patenting, but copyright? Is a shoe tread artistic expression?
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Marcus Carab (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 1:30pm

Re: Re: Talk about tripping themselves up ....
It's what they get for treading on the sole owners of the copyrights.
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Marcus Carab (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 1:31pm

Re: Re: Talk about tripping themselves up ....
aww you quick bastard... I should have scrolled down first.
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alexbasasa, 9 Sep 2010 @ 1:47pm

Quick! Someone call Righthaven!
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Dark Helmet (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 1:54pm

Re: Re: Re: Talk about tripping themselves up ....
Spaceballs are known for being puntastic. Seriously...watch the movie, it's true!
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Nastybutler77 (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 3:16pm

I love it when gumshoes are hoist by their own petards. At least they don't have far to go to track down the culprits.
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Dementia (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 3:17pm

Re: As a somewhat serious aside
Perhaps you can't copyright the tread itself, but the PICTURE of the tread is a completely different matter.
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ofb2632 (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 3:21pm

They only support copyright laws when it suites them. The music industry does that alot also.
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Mike, 9 Sep 2010 @ 4:51pm

search engines
So, you can't download content from the Internet to build a search engine? Does that mean Google can't index Swedish sites anymore?
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Allaun Silverfox (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 7:11pm

Re: As always
It's ok. You don't have to feel like such a heel. But of course if the shoe fits....... :p
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F., 10 Sep 2010 @ 2:24am

The police also needs knowledge like from dictionaries. But the downloaded CD version of the Oxford doesn't run on our system. No problem, download another Windows. That's okay, we have an exemption. Gotta be able to understand what our investigated criminals are saying after all. And who knows if some crime wasn't inspired by the plot of a novel? We should copy them all into our database for keyword searches.

Or maybe the hostage in this video tried to give us an important hint coded into an obscure movie quote. How should we know? What if a victim says the robber looked exactly like the villain from that movie, how are we supposed to create a proper wanted photo? Can't do biometric searches if we don't download those movies.

And porn! All of it. For investigative purposes only, of course. Gotta put those beauty spots in our database, we might recognize someone.
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mhenriday (profile), 10 Sep 2010 @ 6:23am

Our police here in Sweden
are like police all over the world - to them, legality is an extremely malleable concept. Or, to paraphrase a certain Richard Milhouse Nixon, «if the police do it, it's legal».... Henri
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Richard M Stallman, 15 Sep 2010 @ 12:21am

The article is interesting, but there was one flaw:
it used the term "intellectual property", which generalizes
about a dozen totally different laws. That term is
propaganda for our enemies, and every use of the term helps
them by confusing these different issues.
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Mike Nielson, 16 Dec 2013 @ 2:28am

I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post�
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