In Finland, will discuss the proposed community law on copyright

Last year, Habré skipped the news about the “riot of copywriting” , when the police confiscated a nine-year-old girl’s laptop for downloading a music album from torrents and charged a fine from the family (they demanded 600 euros, but eventually they paid 300 ).

Sincerely sympathizing with the girl, I was glad that the situation had developed in that way. Probably, taking into account the ugliness of the story (even the personal intercession of the singer, whose album the girl downloaded, did not help) could somehow put the brakes on, but this would be a selective application of justice, to which we, mostly Russians, should be particularly disliked. There is no need to change bad laws if they are not actually applied (or they are applied according to the favorite principle “friends are everything, enemies are the law”).

However, the story caused a great resonance and served as an incentive for public initiative to change the current legislation, perceived by many as unfair.
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Through the efforts of those who were not indifferent, the “Open Ministry” community created a draft of the new law and sent it to the Kansalaisaloite website for voting . This site is an analogue of our “Russian public initiative” . In accordance with recent amendments to the Finnish Constitution, any public initiative that gained 50 thousand votes should be considered by Parliament. (I think the information about this was also on Habré, but it was not possible to find it immediately).

Six months were allotted to the vote, and somehow the information passed unnoticed that by the end of the reporting period (July 23) the authors of the initiative managed to collect the necessary number of votes. Just in case, I will mention that only adult citizens who passed authorization could vote. So in the near future we will be able to assess how much the members of parliament in Europe are ready to listen to the aspirations of their voters.

Of course, “consideration by parliament” does not mean the adoption of the law. In a sense, what happened can only be called a non-binding successful collection of signatures. However, I would like to draw attention to a number of important points:

1) Initiative participants act in the most constructive way possible. If the law is bad, offer better — that's what they offer.

2) At the same time, the current draft deals with fairly simple things - transferring illegal downloading to the category of minor faults, extending the “fair use” rules, expanding the rights to copy legally acquired materials. In form, not even a new law is being proposed, but only a series of amendments to the existing one. This will probably not be enough for many, but I think the precedent itself is important here. The community is trying to liberalize the unjustifiably rigid law, and the borders of this liberalization can be revised in the future.

3) Many popular Finnish websites actively supported the initiative by placing black banners of approximately the following type:



4) The people themselves have shown significant activity. For us, 50 thousand votes does not look an outstanding result, but for the Finns this is more than one percent of the total population with voting rights. Accordingly, for Russia, one percent of the electorate is more than a million people. How many of our initiatives are able to collect a million signatures? (Note, this is a relatively abstract problem, equally close to both Russian and Finnish grandmothers).

5) Public experts (let's call them that) become participants in the legislative process. The head of the "Open Ministry" Pekkanen argues that members of parliament and do not hide that the current laws are mainly developed by lobbyists. But let's look at the situation from which side: suppose, a conscientious deputy wants to honestly serve the good of the voter, but what are his possibilities? He himself will not be able to write a competent law, which means that we need law experts who can be found in abundance in any anti-piracy organization. I do not know where to get lawyers with an alternative view. Where can they work? I think that thanks to the increasing popularity of “pirate parties” and open Internet communities, such specialists will be able to express their position more loudly.