New law has done nothing to dampen illegal downloading
Surprise, surprise! New Finnish legislation put forth last autumn to stop illegal downloading hasn’t done a damn thing…
Over half of all Finnish young people illegally download music, films and games from the internet despite recently tightened copyright laws. According to a survey carried out by the YLE Uutismixi programme, 59% of ninth graders download music from the net without payment. Some 38% download films and TV series. Games are regularly downloaded by 26% of those surveyed.
Cue the violins…
Finnish musicians, game producers and film industry employees lose millions of euros annually due to pirate copying. The survey revealed that tougher legislation outlawing the copying of illegally downloaded material is not having the desired effect.
I love these massive amounts of civil disobedience and lawbreaking. It makes obedient Finland not so obedient anymore, and citizens are more likely to ignore the state’s intrusive and unjust laws in the future.
Seed please!
Comment by Anonymous — Fri, Apr 28th, 2006 @ 12:29 pm
…and why would the teenagers, who only see the prosperous, glamorous side of the industry, think that they are doing any harm to it at all..?
…I haven’t seen that information pack, but I would expect, that as everything in Finland: it’s way too subtle in it’s approach & the reader falls asleep before reaching the points that matter the most…
If everyone would purhcase goods with a receipt, downsizing the “grey economy” effect, we’d have much lower taxes & more money to spend.
“Pakkasella housuihinsa kuseminen lämmittää”
Comment by FinnFreak — Fri, Apr 28th, 2006 @ 1:36 pm
It doesn’t help matters with the price of a new CD. You can get four new CDs at Best Buy in America for the price of two here. It’s regoddamndiculous. That kept me from buying a 3rd CD at the local shop, as i had already spent 40 €. As for the downloading of shows, the reason why i do it is because the shows are between 2-4 seasons behind. One of them doesn’t even air here. I was excited about ABC’s idea, it was really a step in the right direction. I’d be more inclined to download the shows i watch if the network offered it for free download w/commercials.
I do have a few downloaded movies but i’d rather just buy them.
Comment by gopha — Fri, Apr 28th, 2006 @ 2:14 pm
If everyone would purhcase goods with a receipt, downsizing the “grey economy†effect, we’d have much lower taxes & more money to spend.
False. The goverment would still continue to grow, gradually consuming more in overheads, and discouraging more efficient free market solutions from being invented.
The way to downsize the goverment is to:
(1) Use every legal means available to you to minimise your taxes, and (2) always insist on paying for high quality private services in place of free (and inferior) public ones.
It goes without saying that one should not accept any public grants, awards, subsidies, welfare payments, etc. All those are payed out of confiscated (=stolen) money, and therefore come with very bad karma attached to them.
Grants and awards from private funds are ok, of course. And this, by the way, is how you change the society ethically if you happen to have some extra cash. Set up a fund or program to privately support a cause that matters to you.
The government is like a cancer. The way to deal with it is to not feed it (give tax money), and simultaneously gradually shrink its living space by refusing to accept any of its “free” services.
The effect of this approach to you, personally, will be an improved quality of life. The effect to the society will be that entrepreneuring inventors will get a chance to introduce more efficient and higher quality solutions to the problems that goverment failed to solve with its bureaucratic programs and silly laws.
Music downloading is a good example. The only effort so far to have had any dampening effect on illegal downloading has been iTunes. The solution: Just make paid downloading more attractive than stealing. Problem solved.
Comment by Liber Al — Fri, Apr 28th, 2006 @ 3:02 pm
“Finnish musicians, game producers and film industry employees lose millions of euros annually due to pirate copying.”
…based on what?
Do they really think that the pirates, especially teens, would or could buy everything they download? Heck, I could have bought maybe a single boring record per month at 9th grade. Most of the downloaded games are crap which are deleted as soon as people realise how sucky the game really is. Thank god people didn’t have to spend their money to find it out. What about the advertising effect of warez, it’s enormous! Succesful titles are often bought and people are telling each others how good it is - buy buy buy!
Warez is a part of our lives nowadays, you cannot get rid of it. Besides, we’ve had C-casettes, why didn’t everyone put half the people to jail for piracy back then? Do we really wan’t to punish all the pirates? We’d have third of the country locked up for good, or worse.. in debt for rest of their lives. The copyright holders wouldn’t just lose their hallucinated millions, but the whole country would be bankcrupt. Think about third of the population with huge debts.
Some game developers have already realised this fact - it’s simply too wide spread activity and only a few copies would actually sell if there’d be no piracy, instead of the millions. One of these are the developers of Galactic Civilizations II, which immediately made it to the top selling titles list. They’ve publicly acknowledged that piracy will continue to exist regardless of laws or copy protections. They’ve taken a realistic stand on piracy - they’re trying to get the benefit of it instead of uselessly fightning against it.
This is not about defending piracy, but about having a realistic approach against it. It cannot be fought against by laws or punishments, that’ll only hurt everyone, including the producers. The bad effects of piracy are most often grossly exagerrated.
Comment by S.Y — Fri, Apr 28th, 2006 @ 3:25 pm
/”Finnish musicians, game producers and film industry employees lose millions of euros annually due to pirate copying”/
Apparently they are assuming that people would buy as much as they donwload those stuff. But that’s not true.
Comment by Name — Fri, Apr 28th, 2006 @ 6:19 pm
The end of music as we know it.
Still Finns value creativity don’t they, that’s why they are happy to allow the current situation.
What’s the point of making music or writing books or anything else if somebody else can just rip off your copyright with tacit state approval.
I am totally against monopolies. However, patents and copyrights are forms of government intervention that favour society in general.
The attitude amongst many Finns I know is “interesting” they will rip off foreign artists, but they will pay for music recorded by Finnish artists. Its all a bit like the Nazis, who managed to get Joe public to boycott Jewish products
Comment by Finnish honesty — Fri, Apr 28th, 2006 @ 11:33 pm
I stopped downloading warez few years back… Too much movies, music and games made movies, music and games completely boring, though I hated music already. Realised how stupid they all were, and started thinking “what do I need these for?”. Outdoorsie stuff replaced culture and entertainment, and I started feeling a lot better physically and doing way better at school.
Thank you, DC++, for destroying my interest for pointless entertainment.
Comment by A Finn — Sat, Apr 29th, 2006 @ 2:54 am
Not following current trends and embracing popular culture will result in erosion of human relations and is not recommended for people under the age of 18.
DC++ is a legal P2P-program only when used to share freeware, shareware and files the sharer has legal rights to and the use of it is not recommended for people over 18 due to legal responsibilities which may follow when your share reaches 1 Terabit or when one of your files has “bomb instructions” or other questionable content in it.
Reading this or comment 8 fully or partially relieve commenter “A Finn” of all responsibilities from saying that commenter downloaded warez years ago.
Comment by Disclaimer — Sat, Apr 29th, 2006 @ 3:02 am
I’m all for the ease of downloading, and the development of new economic models. I’ve even worked for ventures whose business models were based on open-source applications. But I still fail to see any attention paid to models which preserve incentives for creation of content, if content can be ripped off.
However, it is happening worldwide, and it’s hard to fight against such a powerful trend. But, to make things interesting, I would support dropping laws for prosecuting downloaders, and legalizing the creation of trojan horses: dummy mp3 files and whatnot on filesharing sites that will destroy the computers of anyone who downloads them without paying for them from the artists’ own sites.
Trojan horses are not viruses as such, in that they don’t spread. Only the perpetrator suffers. The risk factor alone would encourage people to at least make a one-time payment to artists for their creative product.
Comment by Finnpundit — Sat, Apr 29th, 2006 @ 5:52 am
But I still fail to see any attention paid to models which preserve incentives for creation of content, if content can be ripped off.
I’m sure they have ideas in mind, but they’re just not sharing them until they’re force to. They’d be foolish to announce, “We have a model where you can keep downloading and we’ll remain filthy rich, just not as rich as we were.”
legalizing the creation of trojan horses: dummy mp3 files and whatnot on filesharing sites that will destroy the computers of anyone who downloads them without paying for them from the artists’ own sites.
I’m not sure the punishment fits the crime there. Erasing your entire hard drive because you downloaded a Brittney Spears song? I’d rather take the big fine.
Comment by Phil — Sat, Apr 29th, 2006 @ 11:03 am
yeah that will work
fighting ‘crime’ with crime
Comment by Blah — Sat, Apr 29th, 2006 @ 11:03 am
Piracy hasn’t meant a thing for the actual game developers for ages, it’s mostly the publisher side that is interested in preventing it. Game devs curse all the starforce etc. protections probably even more than the actual end-users. Also, piracy ain’t that big of an issue in the console side anyway, even though it’s gotten easier. Make a good game, give it proper marketing and release it at a good time and there’s no reason why it wouldn’t succeed if you can get the buzz going.
Comment by Reko — Sat, Apr 29th, 2006 @ 11:06 am
Great work and pretty colors!
Comment by Nude video xa — Fri, Feb 16th, 2007 @ 10:34 pm