Swedish Copyright law

Copyright can seem a little scary. This is an attempt to make it a bit more understandable. Disclaimer: At the library we are not lawyers. The advice we can give is general.

There is no need to apply for copyright for creative works in Sweden. Sometimes you see a © in a creative work, but it is really no need for it. Copyright is mandatory. When copyright expires for a creative work (that is when the creator has died plus 70 years in Sweden) it falls into the public domain and belongs to all of us. As a creator you can licence your own work to make it part of the public domain if you want to.

Without crucial exeptions and limitations to copyright legislation there would be no libraries, no reasonable way of citing, no search engines, no reviews, no music on the radio, no streaming movies and so on. It is thanks to these exeptions that we can discuss, cite and use lots of copyrighted material. Without them, life would be dull (and expensive!). Some exeptions also makes it possible to adapt copyrighted material for the visually impaired. In Sweden for example Myndigheten för tillgängliga medier is allowed to adapt any written book into speach so that people with difficulties reading can access these book.

In Sweden we have different types of agreements for these exeptions to work. For example, there is an agreement called Bonus-avtalet that almost every Swedish university and school pays for so that students can copy a reasonable amount of pages from books. It's the same for music. You can listen all you want at home, but if you play music in your shop or play at a club you have to sign an agreement with Stim who organizes musicians and distribute income from theese agreements among songwriters.

Read more about copyright in Sweden.