Finnish parliament passes new controversial copyright law

[TankGirl]

Finnish parliament passes new controversial copyright law

After a heated debate yesterday the Finnish Parliament unsurprisingly passed a new copyright law intended to 'harmonize' the national copyright laws with EU directives. The voting result was 121–34 for the new law. The law will make it illegal for the consumers to break copy protections on digital media even for their own fair use, and this particular point initiated an unforeseen active e-mail campaign from citizens to the members of the parliament plus a 300-strong demonstration in front of the parliament house yesterday. The new law does not criminalize downloading of copyrighted material from Internet for private use but as many p2p clients automatically share further what you are downloading, this is a rather meaningless detail.

The lively parliamentary debate revealed some interesting details about the legislation process. A parlamentary committee responsible for the preparation of the law - which has been admitted to be obscure and problematic even by its supporters - defended its actions to the parliament by telling it had heard 66 specialists during the preparation of the law. It turned out that over 20 of these specialists represented copyright industries and organizations while the consumers had no representation at all. The Finnish cultural minister Tanja Karpela, who had a leading role in pushing the new law through, defended her own actions with the pressure from EU commission. In closer scrutiny it turned out that official communications had been limited to verbal communications between one EU clerk and one Finnish ministery clerk. Overall, Karpela showed remarkable cluelessness throughout the debate while her main challenger, tech-savvy Jyrki Kasvi from Green Party, made a good case for rejecting the obscure and lopsided law and demanding a full rewrite of it. When the Finnish MP:s started to get hundreds of e-mails from worried citizens minister Karpela was quick to criticize the e-mails as a rogue campaign organized by a small activist clique. Many parliament members corrected this false claim in the debate and expressed their satisfaction of this newborn citizen activity and interest in parliamentary work. Large numbers of Finns have expressed their opinions on the issue on various public discussion boards, and over 100 websites have joined a spontaneously born "Am I A Criminal?" banner campaign.

DigiToday, a well-established Finnish online news publication focusing on IT, media and business topics, organized an online poll about the new law. 98 % of 4542 voters opposed it. The magazine also set up quickly special pages to do live reporting from the Parliament, publishing both the entire parliamentary debate verbatim and the detailed voting records of the MPs. The magazine seemed clearly to side with the consumers on the issue.

Perhaps the most significant result of the debate was the politicization of the copyright issue in Finland. A day before the decisive vote two small opposition parties and all political youth organizations associated with the Finnish parties ended up officially opposing the new law. A somewhat similar development happened earlier in the summer in Sweden when a corresponding law was passed in the Swedish parliament. Another positive outcome of this unexpected burst of citizen activity is the heightened public awareness of copyright issues - both among people and among the MPs - which will put the parliament under a much closer public scrutiny in the future when new copyright legislation will be worked on.

More here and here.