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Finland Is Crowdsourcing Its New Copyright Law
An anonymous reader writes "Internet activists in Finland, upset with the country's strict copyright laws, are ready to take advantage of the country's promise to vote on any citizen-proposed bill that reaches 50,000 signatures.
Digital rights group Common Sense in Copyright has proposed sweeping changes to Finland's Lex Karpela, a 2006 amendment to the Finnish copyright law that more firmly criminalized digital piracy. Under it, 'countless youngsters have been found guilty of copyright crimes and sentenced to pay thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands, of euros in punitive damages to the copyright organizations.'
The proposal to fix copyright is the best-rated and most-commented petition on the Open Ministry site."
They can fix and improve and change as much as they want. The moment it is out and the US doesnt like it, starts accusing Finland of "theft" and threatens painful trade sanctions, they will have to revert it back or face consequences more severe than putting up with the current copyright.
Copyright is simply too valuable for the few influential stakeholders to be allowed to be decided democratically.
If this is even remotely successful then a lot of lobbyists will get their knickers in a twist.
...
The chances of this being ratified should be rather slim due to:
-international treaties
-legality of the law without having to rewrite other laws
-being watered down in parliament
I would guess a lot of lawyers will work on this thing. So chances are this might be the best written piece of legislation never to be signed.
the common democratic illness is that we vote for politians based on how well they look in a suit, how loud they shout their simple truths and how long ago they had their last sex scandal. Should be credibility, competence and merit. Oh well.
20 minutes into the future
I turtose the death penalty for convicted meta colestors.
FTFY
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Sure, you can crowdsource and gather signatures all you want - have fun, at least you will feel more in control. All you get is to submit your proposition for parliament to vote on. At which point the same lobbyists and paid politicians as usual make the decision. There is no way in hell this is going to pass.
There is an citizen's initiative to change the law and if they manage to gather 50000 signatures, the parliament must vote on it. No crowdsourcing (at least any more) and slim change of this initiative passing through the parliament and actually becoming a law.
Finnish copyright law has very flexible permissions for private use.
1) Few copies of legally obtained copyrighted material can be copied for private use
2) Private use includes family members and best friends.
3) In court the "few copies" has been seen to be 10 copies
4) You are allowed to outsource the copying if needed (you can give copyrighted material to third party what copy them for you and give original and all copies back).
5) Downloading from Internet isn't illegal, it is just admonished, but sharing (uploading) is criminalized.
6) You can brake the DRM if it is necessary to get music to be heard, video to be seen or text to visible (etc)
7) You can transform content to another if it is required to get content available. (meaning you can make a copy of DVD as VHS if other has only VHS player. Or transcode WMA to MP3 if only having a MP3 player).
8) If original media is destroyed, stolen or lost, all copies needs to be destroyed.
9) You can not make new copies from copies or release them to any other third party (non-family members, not best friends)
In Finland you are allowed to borrow a CD music from library and make those 10 copies for you, to your family members and best friend. Any of those copies can be a version in MP3 files, a CD or WMA etc, as long the amount is same.
You can as well buy a latest movie/music from store with your 4 friends, make 3 copies and divide the music price by 4. Meaning 20 euros music is just 5 euros for each of one.
You can as well rent a movie for few euros and make a copy of that for private use.
You are allowed to record movies and shows from TV and make few copies of them as well for private use.
But all this has a cost.
You need to pay a small tax in every empty CD, DVD, HDD, SSD and now on memory sticks as well. It is about 15 euros from HDD what is bigger than 750GB
About a 15 cent on empty DVD and about 10 cent on empty CD.
Every importer is demanded by law to pay that and that is transferred to device/media prices.
But people are mad about it!
Many are mad of it because "I pay more about empty media/storage than I should" and many even promote their ideas by saying "I only store my own music and my own photos and videos to those medias". And still most doesn't even understand that spending a few euros a year for that tax, you can make as many copies for private use from legally obtained copyrighted material as you wish.
Teens usually listen same music with their friends. Instead them needed to buy a own CD (2 x 20 euros) to CD-player and then again MP3 version (2 x 10-15 euros for album) phone/mp3-player, they can together buy just a single CD, make copies of it and transcode music as MP3 files in 20 euros.
How about lex karpela?
Lex Karpela was a addition to copyright law what criminalized braking strong DRM. That what was "strong DRM" was not written at all. Later two man went and wanted to test that law in court. Other one made a DVD with a CSS encryption in it. Then borrowed it to friend, what made a copy of that disk by braking the CSS. And then the copyright owned (who borrowed DVD to friend) sued friend to court demanding 5 cent penalties.
The whole case when to higher court and back, and it was given a judgment criminalizing the friend who broke the encryption because it was not possible "in mistake". The problem was what many doesn't understand, the friend made DVD was not made legally public, it was a personal DVD with DRM.
The copyright law demands the copyrighted material is published legally. Meaning it is that companies what presents, plays, prints etc media, can not control citizens rights to share information and cultural material.
But when a private person makes a own media, she or he owns the copyright for it but just by borrowing it to friend, doesn't mean he or she published it. So it isn't legally obtained material in the first place unless you ask permission from your friend "can I make a copy to myself from your made movie what you
But hopefully some of my likeminded Finnish brethren can see about some sane wording, like no more than 14 year copyrights for corporations, and 28 year copyrights for individuals.
An additional worthwhile amendment would be: 'While copyrighted works created locally will be considered expired after 14-28 years, foreign copyrights will be respected up to their legally agreed upon terms, insofar as our locally produced copyrighted works are protected to the same foreign copyright limits.'
Basically allow your local culture to flourish by being able to build upon their own works within a generation, while limited foreign powers from building upon them for multiple lifetimes (as the global copyright agreements currently stand.) There probably needs to be some extra wording to allow fellow Finns protection in exporting derivative works while ensuring that said works cannot in turn have foreign derivatives licensed against them, perhaps at lower costs than the initial creative force would offer, but otherwise it'd be a good way to gain the benefit of sane copyright laws while handicapping those who would rather rely on lifetime intellectual property.
6/7 years ago, the Finnish parliament voted in the current "pussi paskaa" copyright law. Now, assuming that more than 1% of the population adds their names to a poll in favour of that law being amended (probably a racing certainty), the Finnish parliament has to vote yes/no on the question "did we make a huge mistake here?".
Given that Finland is part of the Euro currency group within the EU, there will probably be significant pressure from political groups within the EU that are backed by the European copyright lobby, as well as significant pressure generated by the RIAA/MPAA. There will also be pressure domestically from the Finnish copyright lobby, which was powerful enough to get the law passed in the first place.
So unless the number of people signing up for a review of the law exceeds 50% (probably not even then... 75% or even 90% might be needed) of the population of Finland, I doubt there is much chance of a vote on the subject gaining the required parliamentary support to overturn or amend the law.
A voter must register and identify themself via their online banking, and they double-check this against the records in the magistrate.
Also, the text for the legislation is now finalized, and only accepting "up-votes" towards the 50 limit. Nothing you can do to astroturf that.
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
The number of signatures required is simply ludicrous. It's pretty close to 1% of the whole population of the nation, including newborns and the elderly.
To put it in perspective..
- 1% of americans would be around 3 million people. Would you sign a petition that REQUIRED 3 million signatures?
Signing is easy, it can be done over internet as in Finland, people have been conditioned to use their e-banking for identification.
- It only takes 20000 names to name a presidential candidate in finland
These days, president of Finland has been mostly stripped of his power other than to talk in grave voice about problems and visit other heads of state occasionally.
- In the last parlament election, the person who got most votes got around 43000 votes. Getting 5000 votes guaranteed a seat.
Apples and oranges, as parliament elections are divided by voting districts and this citizen's initiative thing is national.
It's pretty close to 1% of the whole population of the nation, including newborns and the elderly.
Okay, sure, but do both of those groups have suffrage? (I can see the get-out-the-vote campaigns for the babies....free teething rings for all!)
- 1% of americans would be around 3 million people. Would you sign a petition that REQUIRED 3 million signatures?
Sure, if it was aimed at a useful result like "Don't let the telcos off the hook for helping the NSA violate the 4th Ammendment," or "Reform copyright law so it doesn't last forever minus a day". To be honest, a fair number of the petitions on the Whitehouse's petition site (that have passed the required bar to receive a response) concern issues that are interesting and relevant to most Americans. It's just that 5 or 500 petitions to legalize marijuana aren't going to do a damn thing, because the President doesn't have the political clout or the personal motivation to "make it so".
It sounds like this petition mechanism might actually effect real change -- the kind of change that political parties over on this side of the Atlantic promise up and down the campaign trail, but which, if it ever materializes, doesn't pack quite the same punch as promised -- and for that, I am quite envious of you Finns.
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