I didn't blog about it, but I'm sure you read it in all the other blogs, that the band Radiohead did a revolutionary thing in October of 2007. They released their new album for download on the Internet. Fans were able to pay a price they could determine themselves. This is great news for those of us who believe the old and stagnated recording industry has got it all wrong. We need people like the Radiohead guys to prove them wrong.

It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

This slightly anarchistic, yet intuitively true and acceptable statement has been on my mind many times lately. In Finland the public discussion about copyright often circulates around some legislative questions and arguments for and against certain standpoints. I call this "the EFF tradition". In contrast in Sweden and some other Northern European countries the people active in this discussion represent the Pirate Party line. (Which also exists in Finland but is newly founded and not a dominant voice yet.) While the Finnish discussion follows the EFF-like traditions - raising questions like DRM is bad - the Pirate Party goes right for the other extreme: legalise "piracy" altogether. (Note than then it obviously wouldn't be called "piracy" anymore.) In practice, the stances of EFF/EFFI and the Pirate Party are quite close to each other, for instance on privacy issues or software patents, but the public image and the means towards the end are completely opposite.

I wrote two months ago about the Finnish hacker heroes Mikko Rauhala and Einari Karttunen, who were going to trial for breaking the Finnish EUCD law (equ

According to Google this has not yet been reported in English, so I'll guess it's up to me...

Mikko Rauhala and Einar Karttunen have on February 13th, 2007 been charged with breaking parts of the Finnish copyright law that were passed in 2005 to implement the EUropean Copyright Directive, our equivalent of the DMCA. The charges are that they participated in an online service organised by Mr Rauhala to provide advice on how to circumvent DRM and in addition Mr Karttunen has published online a computer program written by him in the Haskell programming language. The charge is especially serious because Rauhala paid Karttunen 0,05€ for this program.

Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet John Buckman and "Mrs Buckman" Jan as they visited in Helsinki. John gave a talk about his Magnatune business and Creative Commons in the Aula forum. Unfortunately, the video is not yet available online, but let's hope it gets here eventually.