Swedish cops' attempt to build database of shoe-treads snarled in copyright law

By Cory Doctorow at 8:05 pm Thursday, Sep 9

Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay and birthplace of The Pirate Party, has a funny relationship with copyright (not least because of all the US pressure on the country's parliament to pass copyright laws that give advantage to American entertainment giants). Here's the latest weirdness: the Swedish cops are trying to assemble a database of what kinds of prints are made by which brands of shoes, using images harvested from the Web. But Swedish copyright law prohibits this:

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.

Are Swedish Police Violating Copyright Law In Creating Shoe Database? (via /.)

(Image: 26 miles of rock and roll, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from koadmunkee's photostream)