Look how the Finnish authorities pounced on Finnreactor. Why Finnreactor? Because they tracking Finnish movies, possibly harming the Finnish film industry, which much of it funded by Finnish taxpayers. These other trackers are hosting “Hollywood” content, the Finnish film industry’s biggest competitor, I doubt they care as much if people are ripping off stuff produced by evil Americans.

Bigger generations will entrench their interests -was it then about unfair taxation, pensions or protecting the permanent contracts- and let the next ones to pick up the tab.

Don’t be too surprised if there won’t be too many under-30 candidates in the March elections. It’s not because our generation is not interested, but because we don’t make any difference.

It’s a very common pattern in European politics, yet something that completely escapes the traditional left/right and conservative/liberal spectras.

To all those still parading the whole piracy doctrine, don’t you feel sorta stupid that you ate up the dupe that was used to push trough the current laws? Isn’t it going a bit overboard when government – who in essence should be serving YOU – is in fact serving the movie studios and record labels? I understand something needs to be done but everyone who has half a wit I think should realize that the actions shouldn’t transcend the needs of the greater public. When the movie studios are asking that the anti-terrorism laws should be used to track down people who download songs off the internet there really should be some kind of reaction other than “well, they are downloading them illegally”.

For example, it could be a matter that is prosecuted by the European Commission or (possibly) the UN.

I’m not really sure which is the case, but it’s not automatically a law of Finnish design. There’s an international perspective to consider.

I agree with the premise and wish it would have happened sooner…..in the general sense.

Insofar as piracy laws go, I think there are corporate interests controlling the implementation of international treaties. The Finnish government probably needs to comply with international treaties by creating its own national laws to mirror them.

The grey area is in how vigorously the laws are enforced. A good example is the status of recreational drugs in Holland. Officially, Dutch law states that they are illegal. As far as I know, the law needs to be in-place to conform with a particular UN treaty.

But if Holland’s local governments don’t want to waste their time chasing after pot smokers, then there’s really nothing the UN can do.

Technically speaking, the Finnish government might be able to take the same approach regarding piracy. But apparently, the difference is that corporations might be willing to fund the prosecution of downloaders as a civil matter.

LOL!!! “You can suck up bandwidth, but only if it’s for PAID content!!”

I never understood that rule, it’s far more dangerous for me to frantically fish around for my hands-free device, plug it in, stick it in my ear etc…

So according to our website statistics we can assume that Finns have downloaded Star Wreck some 400,000 times. Most of our audience have been 15 to 25 year old men.

There are 360,000 of them in Finland and according to the study 70% of them have downloaded a movie, that makes 252,000 people.

So even if this is theoretical and all 15 to 25 yearl old men have not downloaded Star Wreck, it’s absolutely impossible that all of the people in this study would have downloaded only illegal movies.

Note that some students were expelled from Tampere Univ. of Tech. for getting involved in P2P n/w):

Executive director Antti Kotilainen of the Anti-Piracy Centre in Finland, CIAPC, sees the decision by Tampere University of Technology to expel students suspected of piracy as an encouraging step in the right direction.
“There is no justification for the usage of networks, that were set up with tax-payers’ money, for the purpose of acquiring free entertainment for the students”

Haha. Good point, maybe we should blog about this as well

People could ignore stop signs, red lights, and trash cans – but they choose not to, these laws make sense. It’s far from the draconian laws put in place by the Finnish government, with lots of help from big corporations.

Yes, lets all ignore those silly regulations like stop signs and red lights. And don’t worry about finding a trash can, just toss your garbage. Gravity will take care of it. And oh yeah, F Kyoto.

The process should be that if the law is stupid, like this one, then it should be repealed or better yet, not put into law in the first place. For the politicians who have done this stupid act, they should be voted out.

Why is it that in some cases there is such a strong demand to follow the rules and at the same time a call to ignore them. There is a root problem causing illegal downloading and that is the high price of the media. At least here in the US, if you are patient enough the DVDs will come down enough that it is worth spending the $10 just to have the disk and not deal with storing the media. And how is it that I can buy a movie for $10, but the CD costs $20. As for music downloads, there would be less illegal downloads if there was not so much DRM. iTunes is popular, but it would be even moreso if they had regular mp3s.