Norway is introducing new filesharing laws that appear to be modeled on Canada's. It seems the recording industry has convinced the Norwegian government to diminish the rights of its citizens by making filesharing illegal, then pay the industry with (new?) taxes so citizens can have the privilege of ripping digital audio files of CDs that they already own.

The question is, will Norway actually legislate the new laws, or will the country just let a policy committee order the change as in Canada's case when the Copyright Board imposed a levy -- an unlegislated tax -- on all recordable media?

Fortunately for Canadian music lovers the von Finckenstein decision earlier this year lets Canadians retain their right to share files.

Complicated new laws about filesharing are coming to Norway. I hadn’t realised that downloading copyrighted music from p2p networks was legal in Norway. It won’t be any more. However we’ll still be allowed to rip mp3s from our own, or our friends’, CDs or DVDs, and some of our tax money will compensate the recording industry for this copying. There’ll be no compensation for ripping stuff from copy protected disks. No point in compensating for something that you’re stopping people from doing.

via jill/txt » filesharing laws