Petteri Pyyny
26 Dec 2005 2:18
As some of you might remember, Finnish Parliament approved a new copyright legislation in October, 2005 and that new legislation will come into force on 1st of January, 2006. As AfterDawn Ltd is a company based in Finland, we have to play along with the new law, however vague and draconian it is.
We tried to find alternative solutions and have asked our lawyers to evaluate various options that would have allowed us to continue our operations as they used to be. Unfortunately, none of these options were solid enough to escape the new restrictions.
Thus, we've made our own analysis of the law and come to a conclusion that yes, we can continue running our site, but need to make some adjustments to the content. The law is extremely vague and leaves thousands of questions open, mostly leaving media corporations very free hands to sue whoever they wish to. Despite this, we decided to remove the content that most obviously violates the letter of the law, but decided to leave some breathing room for other areas.
The law has phrases like "Offering commercial services that allow circumventing technical copy protections ... is illegal." But doesn't provide any guidelines on what is considered to be "commercial" and what type of service the law is talking about. Our and our lawyers' analysis is that as we're a commercial company, having ads on our site, and providing guides -- written by our paid staff members -- and tools that help breaking protections like extremely weak CSS found on virtually all DVD-Video discs, we can be sued. And for those of you suggesting "move!", I can tell you that we evaluated that option with our lawyers as well and it would have required not just moving our company and servers, but all individuals involved with the site's day-to-day business as well.
Law also makes it illegal to distribute tools, even for free, that allow circumventing copy protections. However, in the reasong that the Ministry of Education submitted alongside the new law text to the Parliament, they stated that only tools whose main function is, or can be considered to be, to break copy protections, are illegal. Again, the text -- and the reasoning -- are extremely vague.
But as a summary, here are the changes that will take effect on 1st of January or shortly after that date:
Yes, we know, this sucks. But stuff like relocating to other country doesn't work out, unless all of our staff moves there as well..
Additionally, we've decided to set the guides that need removal under the Creative Commons license that allows free distribution of the guides, providing that they aren't altered. The specific license can be read here. The list of guides that will be removed is:
And the list of guides that will be edited (please note that due various rights issues, these guides can't be distributed freely without our written permission and aren't licensed under Creative Commons license) in order to remove specific instructions on how to circumvent copy protections:
And here are the software tools that will be removed from our site on 1st of January, 2006:
That's it... Seems a rather long list, but then again, the two alternatives remaining were either to close the site or face upto 1 year in prison. We are currently supporting several campaigns in Finland that aim to amend the copyright legislation, but don't hold your breath on success, as it seems that the Ministry of Education and main parties have been fully brainwashed by large media corporations who are the only ones gaining something from this law.
In case you're interested, here are some of my personal thoughts about this law.