Comments:"Finnish campaigners seek crowdsourced change to copyright legislation (Wired UK)"
URL:http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-01/24/finland-copyright-law-crowdsource
A campaign group is hoping to change Finland's stringent copyright legislation by taking advantage of a law that means any petition that reaches 50,000 signatures must be voted on in the country's parliament.
Finland's government amended the national constitution so that, from March 2012, citizens could submit petitions to the so-called Open Ministry and crowdsource drafts before putting them to public vote. Unlike other countries (like the US or UK) where reaching a certain number of signatures only means that the government has to take a look at it, or discuss it in the legislature, the amendment forces the Finnish government to examine the law, make any clarifications it feels necessary, and then put it to a vote.
Common Sense in Copyright (CSC) is hoping to take advantage of this to force a vote for what it calls "a fair and just copyright law in Finland". That means overturning a controversial 2005 act which introduced more severe punishments for copyright infringement that the group says does nothing more than "harm the artists and stigmatise the consumers". They specifically cite the case of a nine-year-old girl who had her home raided by police and her computer confiscated for allegedly downloading an illegal copy of an album. She was given a €600 (£504.83) fine and forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement, a move that attracted widespread international criticism.
To rectify this, the CSC petition proposes a raft of amendments to soften the penalties for copyright infringement. Fair use would be made a stronger defence (for instance, for educational organisations), people would have the right to make private copies of their digital content, and a scaling-down of fines for those found guilty of infringement from a level that is considered punitive to one that is more in line with compensating the copyright holder for their lost business. There's also a section that would stop copyright holders demanding that infringing IP addresses be disconnected from the internet -- a clause that is common in the copyright legislation of other countries, like France.
The petition -- called "Ehdotus Tekijänoikeus ja Rikoslain Korjaamiseksi", which Google tells us means "Proposal for a correction to criminal and copyright justice" -- went live on Open Ministry on 23 January, and currently has more than 5,600 signatures, over ten percent of its required total. Each petition on Open Ministry needs to reach its target within six months of launching in order to be valid, but as one of the site's most popular petitions it looks like the proposal may well reach 50,000 in a matter of weeks.
If the signature succeeds in changing the law, Americans may well look on with envy -- the White House's "We The People" site is viewed as being so ineffective that one of its most popular recent petitions was to get the government to take other petitions more seriously. The government's reply ("We're listening. Seriously.") did little to change that perception.
Image: Aija Lehtonen / Shutterstock.com