The initial quote from Dave has some major mistake. We just had a revision of the copyright law in Switzerland with the aim to ratify the WIPO copyright treaties. But the situation is different to the EU or US and the copyright law is very liberal. As mentioned in other replies, downloading remains legal for private use. The paragraph on technical protection measures contains a right to break copy protection technology, as long as you use the file for legal purposes (private copy, education, libraries etc).

There has been a real public debate about it and different civil liberty groups, free software groups and artists in Switzerland tried to influence the law. Many of us are not totally happy with the final law, but still many of us see it as a compromise. In the final month the main strategy was to keep the right to circumvent technical protection in the law and to keep downloading from any source legal.

As far as I know no big interested group planned to do a referendum.

Detailled offical information about the law is on the website of the parlament:

http://www.parlament.ch/D/Suche/Seiten/geschaefte.aspx?gesch_id=20060031
(only German, French or Italien)

The levies on MP3 Player were not part of the new law. The levies are based on a decision of a court and the already existing law from 1992. The court had to decide about a complaint from consumer organisations against the collecting societies. The consumer organisation lost.

Below a list of groups interested in copyright law in Switzerland:
http://www.kunstfreiheit.ch
http://www.siug.ch
http://www.allmend.ch