Finnish Bureaucracy Takes Issue With Crowdfunded Textbook

linjaaho writes "Senja Larsen, who runs popular Facebook study group Senja teaches you Swedish, collected $14,161 via Kickstarter's crowd funding service. The project caught much media attention in Finland (TV and all major newspapers), since it is the first crowdfunded book project in this country, and among the first Finnish crowdfunded projects. (Previous ones include the movie Iron Sky, the role-playing game Myrskyn Sankarit, and the Wishbone headphone wire manager). Now, after successfully collecting the funds for the book (and after the book has been edited and printed), the National Police Board of Finland has asked Senja to submit a statement [PDF; Finnish] concerning using crowdfunding to finance a project [PDF; Finnish] and the terminology used. It is possible that all the funding collected must be returned. The main problem is that direct translations of terminology at Kickstarter, such as 'bounty' and 'support,' are interpreted to mean collecting money without giving anything back, and this kind of operation requires a permit which can be only given to associations, not to private persons, and it takes long to apply for such permit."

Comments

Re:.gov gone wild

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not bureucracy gone wild, just common citizen doing things

So you're quite happy to live in a world where every time you want to "do things" you have to go scouring through law books and beg the government for permission?

Re:.gov gone wild

[Kjella]

So you're quite happy to live in a world where every time you want to "do things" you have to go scouring through law books and beg the government for permission?

In a lot of cases where I'd call it preemptive crime prevention, yes. For example if you pretend to be a doctor but don't have a license to practice medicine, we don't have to wait for an actual malpractice case. You are already breaking the law just by trying. If you operate a restaurant I don't mind that you have to have a permit so that health inspectors both know you exist and have a right to investigate your facilities before you put people in the hospital. If you pretend to operate a charity, I don't mind that you need a permit that requires documentation that the money goes where you say it's going and is not a fraud. I don't mind that the government must approval of your rental units before there is a house fire where someone doesn't get out because there's no fire exit and you're charged with manslaughter.

A permit is not something the government should hand or not hand out on a whim, it should have a clearly defined list of requirements and those who fulfill the requirements should get a permit. Of course you could say that the "free market" should fix this, that people would simply stop going to unsanitary restaurants but the practical experience has been that the market hasn't fixed this so instead of quoting dogma we found a solution that did. Sure you can have too much bureaucracy as well, but a lot of the time the businesses trying to fly "under the radar" without a permit do so because they are breaking a lot of other laws and regulations that are there for a reason. If I just pick a place to eat at random I don't expect great food, but I do expect that it's fit for human consumption. It's really not too much to ask.