[pp.int.general] Nothing quiet on the Finnish Front

[Ole Husgaard]

Hi,

Nice to see that our friends in Finland have founded the party. Just as
in Denmark and many other countries, it looks like you have some
significant struggles for a fair copyright legislation.

But you are lucky that you do not need to get more signatures. In
Denmark we have to get signatures from 2% of the voters to be able to
run for the EU-Parliament. And we need not only the signature; we need
enough information from each person signing (full name, full address and
SSN) to make identity theft easy. After that we have to send the
signature to the right local people's registration office, and they have
to verify that the signer is real. And then the people's registration
office sends the approved signature back to the signer so he can confirm
that he really meant his signature by returning the approved signature
to the party. Only if we have approved and confirmed signatures from 2%
of the voters, we can go for the EU Parliament election.

Best Regards,

Ole Husgaard.


Kaj Sotala skrev:
> Yarr, international mates,
>
> it's been a busy couple of days. On the weekend, we had the founding
> meeting of Piraattipuolue, the Finnish Pirate Party. There was an
> attendance of around fifty people, we managed to choose our party
> leaders and accept the official party agenda, listened to Rick's
> excellent speech and generally had a good time. People were energetic
> and everything looked promising.
>
> Things started to get really interesting on Sunday, when I was on my
> way back from the meeting. Together with another participant, I had
> liveblogged the whole event in Finnish. While on the way, we got the
> word that the Blogger-based conference blog had been suspended for
> violating the Terms of Service! Of course, we immeaditly suspected
> some evil conspiracy by the Forces of Copyright. Turns out the
> 38-postings-in-two-days pace had triggered some automatic spam bot
> protection and flagged our blog as a suspected spam one. We've tried
> to contact Blogger to get it reinstated faster, but no response so
> far. Also made a Slashdot submission out of it for the hope of getting
> some extra publicity ("Google suspends Finnish Pirate Party blog") -
> it's currently been in a pending state for at least 24 hours.
>
> That wasn't the end of unexpected things, though - on Monday, I woke
> up to an SMS telling me that under a certain interpretation, Linux had
> just been outlawed. What the hell?
>
> A bit of history, here. A few years back, the Finnish government
> passed the so called "Lex Karpela" copyright law, named after our
> cultural minister at the time. Based on an EU directive, it was made
> even more stringent than the directive required, written as such by
> politicians who claimed that the EU required us to make it that
> strict. This wasn't true, of course, but it didn't stop them from
> saying otherwise. Anyway. Part of it outlawed overriding "efficient
> technical copy protection", a term which was never properly defined.
> In the same year, two activists programmed a DeCSS implementation and
> turned themselves in for having violated the law. A district court
> decided that DeCSS didn't qualify as "efficient" as defined by the
> law, and ruled them not guilty. The prosecutor appealed. This morning,
> the Court of Appeal overruled the district court's decision, finding
> the two guilty, though not passing any sentence since the infraction
> was considered mild. Producing and sharing any sort of DeCSS
> implementation is now considered illegal by the CoA. An appeal to the
> Supreme Court is being considered.
>
> As you can imagine, this caused some... interesting reactions in
> online communities. I was already about to write a press release about
> our founding, and we now added the party's official protest against
> the Court of Appeal's ruling to the release. So far no media sources
> seem to have picked up on our protest against DeCSS, unfortunately,
> though one paper ran a brief story about our founding on their
> website. A reporter for another newspaper e-mailed me with a bunch of
> questions, which I answered, and there's apparently going to be some
> sort of article in tomorrow's paper. On the other hand, this decision
> seems to be great timing for our online recruitment drive. I pasted
> the URL of our press release denouncing the decision to an IRC channel
> and I soon had three new people asking if they could help out with the
> Pirate Party somehow. :-) The founding conference blog managed to
> gather something around 700 unique visitors in the two days that it
> was up, too, so I'd say we have a pretty good chance of being
> successful.
>
> Currently we're waiting for the appropriate state agency to approve
> the initial party registration, after which we can start gathering the
> 5000 signatures needed to be eglible for the elections. Besides
> helping write the press release and the answers to the reporter, I've
> spent most of this day working on our website and bringing it up to
> date and planning things with the rest of the party leadership. Things
> are looking good, and I'm optimistic that we'll have a chance at
> getting some of us into the Finnish Parliament in the 2011 elections.
>
> -- Kaj, Piraattipuolue spokesthing
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