New Finnish draft copyright law

The Finnish Ministry of Education has published a new draft copyright law.
The new proposal does not differ a lot from an earlier version that was
rejected by parliament last February. It is still highly complicated and
overzealous.

On the positive side the so-called ‘community first sale doctrine’ is now
limited to commercial entities only. Also, DVD-country codes are now
clearly defined to be outside the anti-circumvention rules. On the
negative side the proposal only allows circumvention of copyright
protection in case of listening or watching, but not for private copies.
The proposal also forbids the reverse engineering of software if the
software is used as a technical protection measure. This is not based on
the directive but is a purely Finnish ‘invention’.

Electronic Frontier Finland has been asked to write a statement about the
law and also to participate in parliamentary hearings, which will be held
in the last week of August. Participation is technically open to anyone
and thus not limited to Finnish organisations. For example, last time the
MPAA produced a written statement about the draft law. This means that if
somebody wants to try to explain why limiting otherwise totally legitimate
reverse engineering is a bad idea or something similar, it can be done.
The deadline for statements is 5 September. Please contact EFFI if you
want to help so that we can co-ordinate the effort and give more detailed
information about the law.

Ministry of Education’s EUCD-page (in Finnish)
http://www.minedu.fi/opm/tekijanoikeus/direktiivin_voimaan_saattaminen.html

(Contribution by Ville Oksanen, EFFI)