Photo bans, blocking requirements and more tape taxes - has copyright gone into the ditch?

Today Wikimedia lost a case in the Supreme Court. Can you take a photograph of a work of art in a public place and put it online? Not according to Swedish law.

But you can make copies of films and music bought individually. This became relevant in the 1970s with the cassette tape. A tax was introduced on these to compensate for loss of sales. The law and tax are still in place today. This is despite the fact that copying has become a marginal phenomenon. Reality has changed, but copyright remains the same. This has led to Swedish courts finding it reasonable to impose a cassette tape tax on smartphones and laptops.

Speaking of money, every Swedish movie streaming service seems to have thrown in the towel. Business is not going well. Pirates!...someone might shout. But the reality is that it's hard to get attractive movie rights when you're suffering under the screening window policy's rotation rules (cinema first, then moratorium, then maybe digital).

Whether in film, music or software, today's winners have created value and customer loyalty that is not based on the production and sale of copies. Which copyright law regulates. Mainly by offering services. But also by adding other values. Such as Spotify's public playlists, Google Docs' collaborative features and Netflix's recommendation algorithm.

Constantly extended terms of protection, cassette tape taxes, ever-higher penalties for infringement, recurring demands for internet blocking and intermediary liability, and most recently bans on the online publication of perfectly legal photographs of works of art in the public domain do not lead to a more effective copyright. At least if we mean promoting innovation, growth and creativity.

If anything, this leads to the question of the relevance of the copyright system in the digital service society.