Slashdot Mirror
Finland Adopts New Copyright Legislation
Anonymous Coward writes "Finland has adopted European Union Copyright Directive with new changes to its national legislation, giving Finland one of the most record label friendly pieces of legislation in Europe. The article has a good summary of the new law's changes to the old, rather flexible legislation."
More information here:t ml
http://www.effi.org/tekijanoikeus/laki/index.en.h
Possession of tools that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms will be illegal. Even for personal use.
So if some particular copy protection is totally shitty and is defeated by common items, those common items suddenly become contraband?
Are you trolling? Finland has lots of bands that play excellent music, especially heavy metal, though I'm not sure whether they are well-known outside Europe. See Category:Finnish musical groups and Category:Finnish heavy metal musical groups.
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
As a Finn, I have always taken pride in our country - even though we don't have things like the Bill of Rights, we have our fundamental rights, and our copyright legislation isn't at least as horrible as the DMCA. Well, that has now changed. Finland has enjoyed #1 position in international competitiveness ratings and has been considered a vanguard of the spearhead of information age societies, but this piece of legislation has now set us back years, nay, perhaps even decades.
What wrenches my gut is that despite Finland's top rating when it comes to low corruption, shenaniganry in creating and passing this piece of legislation has been plentiful. The law was prepared in the Ministries of Culture and Education in close rapport with people who work for the very organisations that lobby for stricter controls on what citizens can do with the things they have bought. When sixty-six expert statements were collected on the law, only one was from a consumer-oriented organisation, that being EFFI.
Its passing was surrounded by nothing but smoke and mirrors, with misleading statements based on intentionally erroneus interpretations of the already-muddy law by its supporters. And finally when a demonstration was arranged in front of the Parliamentary building on Tuesday, when the bill was discussed for the very last time, a representative of a musicians' organisation was put on the wires stating the demonstrators' cry for free speech was tarnishing the concept for free speech because the demonstrators just want to download songs in its name. This while behind him people were touting DeCSS signs and spreading out short DeCSS programmes on flyers with the text "distributing this flyer will become illegal".
Not to mention the EEA statute, which makes distributing works not published in the European Economic Area illegal in the EEA, unless they have been acquired for personal use. No more import manga from stores if the publisher overseas decides that the market in Finland is too small.
Well, now there's a galvanised group of a few hundred people who are just really pissed off. We're already setting up forums for "organised discussion" and thinking up ways to turn ourselves in en masse to swamp the system. The Parliament has made an initial decision to modify the law later on, but until then, we'll have to just suck it up.
And guess who used her authority to press the bill through no matter what? The Minister of Culture, a former Miss Finland, whose only merit in getting into Parliament was that she was Miss Finland, and whose only merit in getting into the Ministry was that she raked in so many votes. No, I didn't vote for her.
Finally, what comes to the EU directive garbage, it was just an attempt to deflect blame by the Government. There is only an alleged record of a single EU official stating how tightly the EUCD should be implemented. Finland now has the strictest EUCD implementation in existence. Greece implemented it with most of the stupid parts axed out; a French court has now declared that copy protection (more like "use restriction") has no protection of law. DVD area codes are illegal in Belgium. The only thing the EU directive argument served was the populist and anti-EU True Finns party.
Oh FFS. I think I'll just move to Canada. Bonjour Monsieur, ca va bien, eh?
This nice piece of legislation also makes it illegal to import copyrighted material outside of the EC. For example, it is illegal to buy an anime DVD from Japan if the DVD in question isn't already being sold within the EC.
I forgot to mention that the youth organizations of nine different parties, i.e. all the significant parties from left to right were supporting the demonstration on Tuesday and opposing the new legislation. One could easily think that this extremely rare mutual agreement between youth organizations of parties with completely opposing political viewpoints would give the older (read: computer-illiterate) MPs a signal that there is something badly wrong with the new legislation. Did they get the hint? Obviously they didn't. Lobbyers 1 - Common sense & consumer rights 0.