Finnish copyright protestors to lay siege to MPs

Demonstration outside Parliament

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 4th October 2005 10:37 GMT

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Opponents of Finland's proposed copyright laws are hoping for a good turnout today for a demonstration outside Parliament.

Protestors are calling for the law's opponents to be outside the Helsinki Parliament building at 13.00 Finnish time.

Along with protestors, organisers want members of parliament and the media to come along to discuss the changed law.

Finland, home of Nokia and Linux, is set to impose swingeing controls on consumers' rights to copy media.

After initial confusion it appears the new law would punish consumers for making copies of media for personal use, if they bypassed DRM restrictions to do so. It has also emerged that Jukka Liedes, one of the officials behind the law, is a director of a subsidiary of Gramex - Finland's equivalent of the RIAA.

Register reader Hannu Rajaniemi explained that lack of consumer rights is not the only problem with the law: "It also contains a section forbidding "organised debate" of DRM techniques and demands that ISPs obtain a license to make temporary copies of computer programs. There are also issues with playing DVDs under Linux as it usually involves libraries designed for DRM breaking."

The law would have passed without much public discussion until the parliament got stuck debating royalties on church music. This led to some media debate about the changes but MPs accused Electronic Frontier Finland of organising an email campaign to push the issue further up the agenda.

Protestors want the existing law thrown out and rewritten from scratch with more attention paid to consumers' rights.

More details from the press release here.®

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