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Crowdsourced Finnish Copyright Initiative Meets Signature Requirement
First time accepted submitter Koookiemonster writes "The Finnish citizens' initiative site (Finnish/Swedish only) has fulfilled the required amount of signatures for the third initiative since its founding. This means that the Parliament of Finland is required to take the Common Sense in Copyright initiative into processing. The initiative calls for removal of copyright infringement as a crime, reducing violations by private individuals to a misdemeanor."
Torrent Freak notes "This makes Finland the first country in the world in which legislators will vote on a copyright law that was drafted by citizens."
The people who create things want to control how they bring their work to market. You want to control the people who create things. Who's the control freak?
Coming from a staunch conservative like you, this line amuses me. It betrays a complete lack of understanding of what copyright is, where copyright originated, what its purpose is and why people are upset with the current copyright regime.
Here, let me clue you in:
1) Copyright is a law that restricts the ability to make copies of anything human made.
2) Copyright is an evolution of the old royal print charters. Knowledge was known to be power, and the kings of yore realized very quickly they didn't want just anyone printing whatever they wanted.
3) The purpose of copyright is to control the flow of information and goods. Some of it can be good (it gives writers a chance to make a living), some of it can be bad (it gives people the chance to manipulate the flow of knowledge).
4) What people are upset about is that current copyright terms go far beyond benefiting the original creator, have criminal penalties on them and actually make it very difficult to create something without getting lawyers involved. The only reason you don't see every novelist ever being sued by everyone else is because most are penniless.
Now that you know the story, feel free to participate in the discussion.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A Finn here.
There is absolutely no chance that this results in changes in Finnish copyright laws. They'll have to vote on it, and they'll vote not to do anything just out of pure spinelessness.
> But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used?
Because there's a blurry line that, once crossed, transforms a creative work from a mere commercial expression into part of society's cultural tapestry. Once that happens, you could argue that the creators should still have the right to profit from it for a term, but that the original creators themselves no longer truly "own" it in any moral or cultural sense. It has become bigger than they are.
Some examples:
* Disney's "Victory through Air Power" and "Song of the South". Walt Disney himself sought to personally destroy every copy of VtAP after World War II. He failed only because a lost copy was sitting in a Department of Defense warehouse. The film, viewed today, is positively horrifying... a thousand times more when it sinks in that it's a *DISNEY* film showing yellow planes with slanted eyes divebombing American ships. It's definitely not a cartoon to show little kids for entertainment. BUT, it's one of the most potent records we have today for understanding the cultural background of America's involvement in World War II. It vividly illustrates it in ways that are chillingly real because it's so over the top. The era's newsreels are so sanitized, they almost qualify as comedy. But a *DISNEY* film playing to blatant racial stereotypes? Whoah. That's big. It makes it really sink in how totally Americans were into World War II locally.
Under Berne-inspired copyright law, Disney (as the film's creator) has the absolute right to destroy it. ***SHOULD*** they?
* Disney's "Song of the South". This has always been a problematic film for Disney. It was controversial when it opened in theaters because it talked about one of America's most culturally-taboo topics at the time. No, I don't mean race relations... I'm talking about (*shudder*) /divorce/. Yep, that's right. For anybody who's never actually seen the original movie from start to finish, it's about a kid from Atlanta who gets sent to live with his grandparents on their farm in the rural south while his parents go through a messy divorce out of sight. Everything else was subplot. Complicating things even MORE for Disney, some of their most popular and enduring characters, memes, and marketable songs came from that very movie. Hell, half of Frontierland's characters and rides were inspired by it.
Under Berne-inspired copyright law, Disney has the absolute right to destroy it, or at least prevent anybody from watching it commercially. ***SHOULD*** they? ESPECIALLY when you consider that even the original high-ranking NAACP members who complained about it later admitted that they'd never actually WATCHED it prior to issuing their condemnation, and conceded that while they weren't really *happy* with it, their original gut reactions were a bit overblown.
* Star Wars. The holiest of holy films that defined the childhoods of Generation X... and George Lucas' determination to screw with it to wring a few more bucks out of the original (or at least, the current copy re-edited and re-assembled from original footage). Nobody will argue that Lucas shouldn't have the right to make "improvements" with each new release... but should he ALSO have the right to suppress distribution (even when he's compensated fairly) of the original version? Remember, we aren't just talking about a mere movie. Star Wars (oops, "Episode IV: A New Hope") practically DEFINED the childhoods of millions of American (and eventually, European, Asian, and other) kids. If the Earth were about to be hit by a planet-killing asteroid, a rocket ship were about to leave earth with a few dozen survivors to keep the human race alive, and they had to choose between a copy of Star Wars (the original) and the bible, I put the odds at at least 40-50% that the rocket would be taking off with a copy of Star Wars on board.
Under Berne-inspired copyright law, George Lucas has the absolute right (assuming he hasn't sold it to Disney) to refuse to ever license the origina