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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."
Or maybe not, England (as a European example) has fairly restrictive free speech laws
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's interesting to note that the government claims it won't pursue those who break the copying law for personal use. Isn't it the duty of Government to pursue those who break it's laws? While the people might seem to have a right to break those laws they feel are unjust, I wasn't aware that this was an ability granted to the Government.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
That the entertainment cartel is getting their money's worth from the Finnish legislature.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
there goes Linux... a wet dream for Microsoft... getting Linux outlawed...
and there goes the entire point of owning a personal MP3 player... now the users will have to purchase any music specifically for that player, even if they already have it on CD...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I'm not so jolly Finn anymore.
This made my future voting decision simple.
Christian democratic party and Nationalists(Perussuomalaiset) where ONLY parties which all voted against the law.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Not that I am against downloading illegal music, but what's your point about weed? I've smoked it for plenty of years now, I'm smarter than the majority of people in my class. A's in maths, science, IT and english. It hasn't ever effected me in a negative way (except the obvious short-term memory whilst high --my memory is good otherwise-- and whiteys, which are rare). It helps me with creativity when it comes to programming projects and depending on how much I've smoked, it can greatly help my concentration (get the amount wrong and the complete opposite happens). The drug is being reclassified (already from B to C, and people are trying to get the laws laxed even more) for a reason.
The next time someone wants to talk about drugs being bad, pick one that is. I suggest heroin; nobody likes that except the people who get rich from it. Hell, even alcohol is worse than cannabis, and by a fucking huge distance. 50% of all deaths are alcohol related, it causes a lotta violence (at least here in the UK), we all know the problems with drink-driving, hangovers, doing things you regret with the world's ugliest people, liver damage, the list goes on and on. Compare the same things with cannabis and you'll be damn hard pushed to say weed's the worse of the two. Yet drink is completely legal and nobody gets prejudiced against people who drink.
Anyway, enough of my justification of weed. I think its pretty safe to assume this isn't the first time that laws have seemily stupid punishments compared to other minor (at least in the view of anyone with common sense) offences.
Those bozos in the Finnish government should realize that freedoms that many Finns will want to have are freely available in Russia. Russia is a short drive away along a long and unpatrolable border. Suppose many Finns just decide to go to live and work in St Petersburg and forget all about the fools in their own government. All they would have to do is get in their cars and drive a couple of hours, and if the Finn border guards did not shoot them for conspiracy to seek freedom, they would be home free
I took part in a demonstration against this law on tuesday 1300 Finnish time. There were over 300 people outside the parliament demonstrating against this, and this amount was assembled on under 5 days (or so we were told by the organiser). Only a handful of the members of parliament came out to listen to us or answer our questions, most of them already aware of our case and supporting it. I saw many people peeking out from the windows, looking scarily at us and then leaving, without coming out. One speaker told us something like "we'll have your mp3s sorted out later". What an idiot! Seems like no-one cared to even read the parts of the new law that we stated were problematic. And to think that we only cared about mp3s. We need more people in the parliament who actually understand what this new technology is about. Most of them would probably have problems grasping it if it was explained as LPs and cassette players. Geesh!
More like you can't trust the EU. The EU was sold to us as an economic union. Then we were told we needed a constitution. That the EU would guard our basic rights. Well, thanks a lot you bastards. Thanks a lot for the corruption and injustice you've brought with you. Seems like old Finnish legislation was doing a better job until your directives forced it to change. I weep for the future. The EU as an economic powerhouse could be a great thing. The EU as a source of bad legislation is a recipe for disaster.
And Europeans wonder why a lot of people in the US don't trust the idea of a world court or various other powers above the country level. Whatever happened to national sovereignty? Pretty much what every member of the EU has done has ceded a chunk of sovereignty to a government that they at best have inderect control over. If the EU is going to start demanding legislation, sounds like you should start having elections for the representatives.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
"Economic powerhouse? Doesn't seem that way. Bigger governments encompassing bigger populations tend to hurt their economies in the long run with tariffs, regulations, crony favoritism and inflation."
Then why is the US so successful? I agree that bigger governments often (always?) make a mess of things, but the reason the EU will help growth is that it will open internal borders and standardize business practices/logistics across the union. If it works out...
Another problem with it is that, as humans, we always seem to standardize on whatever most people are already doing. If 5 people herding reindeer in Lapland have the best accounting methods, then the whole union should switch, not force them to change, damnit.
My Sig: SEGV
Actually, according to the new legislation, it is a lesser offense to download an illegal than to rip a copy-protected CD-wannabe (as we all know, those lookalike thingies don't conform to the standards) you have paid for. To top all that, we get the restriction on discussing copy protection circumvention techniques. This is a really sad day for all us Finns, but at least we don't give up without a fight. According to all the IRC discussions I've been following, there seems to be a major uproar building up. In the meantime I have stopped buying records from all record companies that were demanding this law to be adopted. And I am far from alone with my boycott. Not to forget the fact that I used to buy rather many records (many times above the average consumption) on a yearly basis.
Previously I have more or less despised P2P networks, but now that the government is giving the signal that it's more OK to download an illegal copy than to apply fair use policy into stuff you've paid for, it seems like I'll have to start getting my music from illegal sources. Sure it's an offense in the new legislation too, but at least I'm not getting fined or jailed for that like I could get if I ripped a copy-protected record to my iPod.
This new legislation clearly shows what you can expect when you have the former Miss Finland as the Minister of Culture (no, I'm not kidding). I hope we can get a decent government in the next election. At least the voting statistics related to this law give us rather good guidelines on who not to vote. Meanwhile, as the government has regulated: Let the warez flow, but don't you dare to circumvent a copy protection, no matter how weak the so-called protection is.
As evidenced by a spectrum of personal globalization from the rise of the Web to the rise of open sourceware to the rise of common humanity in tsunami relief, a significant meritocratic groundswell exists in which you can vest your hopes for righting plutocracy. When my wife and I visited tsunami relief efforts near Chennai this March, we saw firsthand that our actions from Anytown, USA can have immediate impact, anywhere in the world. We can take into our own hands some parts of the governance of the world, and we can do a more just job of it than the plutocrats.
Through NGOs like Asha for Education, we volunteer our resources and we have done more of certain types of good for tsunami victims than the Indian or Tamil Nadu State governments could do. Our efforts improved victims' lives immediately, effectively, personally, and in a longer lasting manner. In March we saw and it's true still today, NGOs we have funded and volunteered for are actively providing victims with the specific, personal help and resources they need. Asha for Education, for example, is a wholly volunteer organization. They are educating, and clothing and feeding and sheltering and nurturing, the children in India who are most in need. Some of the children they've educated are now adults, some of them here on /.
The plutocrats meanwhile have mismanaged scads of U.N. resources, most of that being from either USA/taxes and/or rerouted U.S. Red Cross donations. Governments have resisted helping victims where there was no additional financial gain for a corporate friend, votes to be won for politicians, or when there was no interest in another press conference with another film star. We saw examples of this on the ground in Tamil Nadu, too. Something like a "housing contract" would be handed out like just another party favor. In turn the lowest quality, even unusable shelters have been constructed by the plutocrats, who believe they have thus maximized their socioeconomic profits.
When I talk about the power "we" have and the change "we've" wrought, I should say that yes I am personally involved but I mean We The People, not of the USA but the people, all people. We more of meritos, though less of plutos. We of more veritas than the profiteers.
The network is the computer, and we are the network.
I'd just like to bring up a country where something of the sort is on the verge of being the case - Russia. That's why some Russians are quite frightened by the Yukos case, involving Khodarkovsky. Basically, the story behind it is (apparently) that he tried to get involved in some political things he shouldn't have - so the government slapped him intto jail for Tax evasion. According to the tax code, he was most definitely guilty of that. The thing that worried people is that the laws were unreasonable, pretty commonly ignored (and these infractions ignored by the government), effectively making EVERYONE guilty and thus suspect to prosecution whenever the government felt like it.