Petteri Pyyny
10 Oct 2002 10:39
Finnish government released today its proposal how it wants Finland to implement new European Union Copyright Directive that each EU member state has to implement into its local laws by 21st of December, 2002.
EUCD, which was approved by European Union in last year, restricts circumvention devices that bypass copy-protections on copyrighted media, such as CDs, DVDs, etc. As it is already approved, it can't be rejected anymore, but each member state can apply various restrictions and relieves to it when they implement the local versions of the law. Finland's original proposal was similiar to the UK's recent proposal -- those could be described by calling them pretty fascist. Finland's original proposal, drafted by the Education Ministry, didn't give virtually any rights to consumers, scientists or librarians at all. After a pretty heavy lobbying from various citizen rights' groups, they have amended the wording pretty much, but obviously there's only so much that a member state can do.
New proposal is slightly twisted, IMHO :-) It allows individuals to copy copy-protected material they own, for their own personal use, just as usual. Proposal also allows individuals to circumvent copy-protection mechanisms in order to backup their CDs, DVDs, eBooks, etc. But the proposal also outlaws distribution of circumvention tools, such as DVD rippers. So, if the proposal is accepted by Finnish parliament, Finnish consumers can legally rip their own movies as much as they want, but the sites who distribute DVD rippers violate the law :-)
One nice thing though -- proposal specifically says that DVD region encoding is NOT a copy-protection mechanism and therefor selling "modified" DVD players that allow all regions to be played, will be perfectly legal in Finland.
But yes, if the law passes like this and if the UK (where AfterDawn is ALSO based :-) doesn't allow non-commercial DVD ripper distribution, it seems that we will remove all DVD rippers by 21st of December from our site. And I expect other European DVD ripping sites to follow the suit. But DVD region code hacks will stay ;-)
Source: Ministry of Education's press release