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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."
....You can smoke pot, but don't you dare illegally download music! Hmmm.... --M
Or maybe not, England (as a European example) has fairly restrictive free speech laws
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It seems the entire world is now a plutocracy, with all nations' laws up for the highest bidder.
Are there any legitimate governments (not owned by the MNCs) left at all?
It seems Finland is as bad or worse than my own (US) government. Very sad.
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!"
More information here:t ml
http://www.effi.org/tekijanoikeus/laki/index.en.h
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.
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?
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.
My Sig: SEGV
Why would it make you, as an American (or so you claim), glad that the freedom of the citizens of another nation have been eroded? A true American, one who actually believes in the ideals of freedom and liberty expressed by the Founding Fathers, would be horrified and disgusted by this development.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
"Possession of tools that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms will be illegal. Even for personal use."
So, I guess this means the new Finnish keyboard will be without a "Shift" key.
That's what happens when people read the document you try to use to refute their point.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Judge: Finnish him!
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!
Expect the "we won't persue copying" claims, in practice, to mean that people will continue pirating, everyone will continue pirating, but only those who politically are the enemies of the record labels will be singled out for it. Want to download the entire Led Zeppelin song catalog, in clear and obvious violation of law? No one will stop you. Want to create an innovative new software program which could change the way music is distributed, but which incidentally could maybe be used to pirate music? Prepare to have the copyright directive, and tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills, come down on your head.
Ayn Rand's said exactly one lucid thing in her entire disastrous body of work, and it was this:
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
Not so very long ago, in many countries, you had to be a land owner in order to vote. Times may have changed, but government power hasn't. Today, governments aren't run by the people, but by the large multinational corporations. Either way, the vast majority of people wind up with no say in how things are run. Even if they vote (which is rare enough), they have a choice between corporate candidate #1 or corporate candidate #2, with the occasional choice of extremist candidate #3, just to give the media something to panic about during the 6 o'clock news.
Orwell was right, gang. The government is not under our control, we are under its. Our every step, and every breath, is monitored from birth thru death by our corporate overlords thru credit cards, phone bills, Tivos, and spyware. Free speech is censored by Google, Yahoo, and others. The openness of the Internet is a lie spread by ISP's who advertise huge bandwidths but close down anyone who actually tries to use it. 1984 was filled with dim-witted, ham-fisted amateurs, compared to the real world.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Denmark adopted the EUCD as one of the first countries and we're still allowed to break copyright protection if needed. Don't blame the EU for this one, Finland made this mess themselfs.
Yes, the EU often make mistakes, but this is not their fault. That being said, the EUCD is still a dumb idea and completly useless.
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...
Whether or not the U.S. is "so successful" depends on how you look at it. As a U.S. citizen, I'm starting to wonder how long it will be before things break down if they keep heading in their current direction. For the past century the federal government has been gaining more and more power over the states, wasting more and more resources due to the inherent inefficiencies of governing at that level, and favoring the interests of whoever has the most money to spend on lobbying - with citizens steadily becoming more disillusioned and hopeless all the while as a result.
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.
Yes, it's called "democracy", and like all other forms of government invented so far it has its drawbacks. Really, though, I think that governments go wrong more often as a result of trying to govern too many people and not from the system they follow (with a few exceptions like small countries that are seized by corrupt dictators).
I think Europe had a good thing going with small countries (on the same order of size as U.S. states) with governments that strike varying balances between democracy and socialism. Trying to unite them under one governing body (especially an economic one!) is just going to introduce the same problems that the U.S. is experiencing (ignoring the people's interests in favor of the interests of whoever has the most money, bureaucratic waste, gradual leeching of power away from individual countries to a self-serving centralized government, etc.)
In closing, I should mention that I'm a computer programmer and not a political activist. I'm also American so I'm probably largely ignorant about the EU situation.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
While I agree with many of your points, it's worth noting that the international criminal court was intended for INTERNATIONAL court cases, ie. ones for which there just is no applicable national laws (or conflicting ones; or involving countries that do not recognized applicability etc). It's not meant for overriding national laws involving only national issues. That is, things like war crimes, crimes against humanity. I mean, lots of things dictators do may actually be legal according to laws of countries they lead: not unsurprising when most laws have been (re)written by the tyrants in place. I don't think that applying national laws of the most powerful nations outside their borders (like what USA is doing, and many other bigger nations would love to, too) is much better than trying to come up with an international court that is focused on specific area where there is a vacuum.