Regarding your media stories that say that "downloading will be permitted", maybe it was referring to a draft of the law.

The new law (effective in January 2008 if no referendum is made by then) sanctions file sharing with a maximum of one year in prison, that's pretty clear if you read the law changes PDF.

I know that downloading is not sharing, but that's the rule of most P2P networks to date.

Christopath:

Interesting links! But still there are some major lack of information here:

The first problem is that those articles were made before the law passed, it was made after the state council agreed on the current version of the project. it was more a "work in progress" status, no referrendum was possible then.

The other problem is that in the french speaking part of Switzerland, nobody even spoke about that. I just made an extensive search, and I could find nothing as of today in the french speaking media (for example, there's no article in 20 minutes referring to WIPO/OMPI in the last 3 months or so).

Were you aware of those issue somehow or did you become aware of it thanks to this boingboing story as well?

Regarding the tax to the Suisa, this is very wrong, specially if this new law becomes effective. Give us a bit of money to charge for copies, but if we caught you, we put you in jail! WTF? That's of course not the only thing that's wrong.

I also want to know if there's a place were I can sign, but I think nobody started a signature collection for now.