Petteri Pyyny
31 Jan 2003 15:20
The Finnish parliament returned the controversial new copyright law proposal back to the ministry which originally drafted the proposal. The proposal was based on EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) that wa supposed to be implemented in national legislation in all EU member states by 22nd of December, 2002.
Only two countries have so far implemented the EUCD requirements into their legislations -- Denmark and Greece. The Finnish proposal for national copyright law was criticized mostly because of vague wording in various important sections. After the parliamentary hearing today, the proposal was returned back to the ministry, after heavy criticism from PMs.
Vice chairman of Finnish Conservative Party, Mr. Jyrki Katainen, confirmed that the very rare dismissal was caused by the extreme unclearness of the law proposal. Unclear legislation with sentences upto 2 years in prison would have posed a serious risk to unitended citizens.
According to Finnish digital rights group, EFFi, there's a small risk that the next proposal could damage the small victories consumer right groups managed to get in to the now-dismissed proposal -- Finnish version of the EUCD implementation clearly stated for example that DVD region coding can't be considered as an effective copy protection mechanism and would therefor be legal to circumvent. But according to EFFi's vice chairman, Mr. Ville Oksanen, it seems that Finnish parliament is pretty much against multinational corporations' wishes to tighten the control of "fair use rights" that consumers currently have.
EUCD, once implemented, will make it illegal to distribute (however, at least in this dismissed proposal, not to use) tools and software utils that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms, such as CSS found on most DVD-Video discs. When the EUCD finally gets implemented into Finnish legislation, AfterDawn.com will have to remove all DVD rippers and similiar tools from our site.
Source: EFFi