New copyright law approaches -- content to be removed
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.
Its, once again, the time of the year when AfterDawn.com team would like to wish all our users very merry Christmas and happy holidays!
