Turre Legal counseled a consortium of Finland’s universities of applied science (aka. AMK) to create a digital repository for theses and research publications . The project adopted a joint Open Access mandate that means that annually 20.000 academic thesis and thousands of scholarly articles written by the staff of the AMK will be openly accessible online.
After 1 January 2010, the Universities of Applied Sciences will require all teachers and researchers who work at the universities to save a copy of their research essays that are published in scientific publications, or a university publication series, in the open electronic library, Theseus.
According to Harvard’s open access guru Peter Suber “This is, by far, the largest set of institutions to adopt a joint OA mandate.”
As a part of the project Turre’s partner Herkko Hietanen has been translating Creative Commons 3.0 licenses to Finnish legal system. The license translation and adoption is at its final stretches and waits for the CC headquarters’s approval. Theseus enables students and teachers to choose a Creative Commons license to their works if they so desire.
Here is a poster of the project and here is an article published in SciecomInfo.
Here is the current draft of the CC 3.0 license for you consideration. Comments to the license are welcomed.
Vantaa district court decided in a case that defines the limits of freedom of speech and online liability that discussion forum administrators are not liable for people gathering to float down the river drinking beer. That is even as the participants used the discussion forum to discuss the organization of the event.
CC-By-SA by HenriBergius. More photos of Kaljakellunta: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=kaljakellunta&w=all&s=int
The prosecutor got tired of hundreds of beer drinking people floating down the Vantaa river every year in “Kaljakellunta” -event. The beer floaters use inflatable rubber boats and ferries to float down the river. Key part of the event is beer drinking. While alcohol and water are integral parts of the event, there has not been any reported major injuries during the +10 year history of the event.
Prosecutor claimed that two men, who were administrators of kaljakellunta.com discussion forum, were the organizers of the event, and thus liable for cleaning up the mess that hundreds of “drunken sailors” made along the river. However, the court saw that the defendants had just posted the date of the 2008 event to the main page of the site after the discussion had reached consensus of it. They had not contributed otherwise to the organization of the event. The actions of defendants did not make them an organizers of the event. The court also looked at the 2009 kaljakellunta event which had even more participants even though the kaljakellunta.com had been closed for over a year.
The fact that the Kaljakellunta-crowd is turning to Facebook and other social networks to help to organize the event just shows that the law has hard time managing self organizing online communities that have no other ties that members like for beer.
Disclaimer: Turre Legal was the defense counsel for the both defendants. And yes, we may join the fellow sailors floating down the river next year drinking beer on a floating devices.
Glenn Rune Gallefoss left and Mikko Välimäki right in Bergen, Norway, 6.6.2009.
We just received confirmation that the first filing in our case against Timbaland and Universal Music has been made in the United States District Court, Southern District of Florida. There is a prior case ongoing in the Helsinki Court of Appeal. We have been representing Glenn Rune Gallefoss, a Norwegian Commodore 64 musician, whose rights have been transferred to Kernel Records Ltd. Some background of the case is here. We are living interesting times…
Today we got a major victory from the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court. The Court vacated earlier decision by Helsinki Administrative Court and ordered new elections for the three municipalities Karkkila, Kauniainen and Vihti where electronic voting was used. This affects tens of thousands Finnish citizens.
The court argued pretty much in line according to our appeal. In summary, the court concluded:
When we take into account the mentioned problems in the voting cards sent to homes and the operational error in the electronic voting system, the actions in the preparation of the elections have been — taken as a whole — against the law. The elections have been conducted in erroneous manner. In addition, when we take into account the big number of unregistered votes, the errors have likely affected the outcome of the elections. The nature of the errors is such that they cannot be corrected. This is why we must order new elections.
(“Kun otetaan huomioon edellä mainitut puutteet kotiin lähetetyssä ilmoituskortin liitteenä olleessa sanallisessa sähköisen äänestyksen ohjeessa sekä toimintovirhe sähköisessä äänestysjärjestelmässä, valmistelussa tehdyt toimenpiteet ovat olleet kokonaisuutena tarkasteltuina lainvastaisia. Vaalit on toimitettu virheellisessä järjestyksessä. Kun vielä otetaan huomioon rekisteröitymättömien tapahtumien määrä, virheellisyydet ovat ilmeisesti saattaneet vaikuttaa vaalien tulokseen. Virheellisyydet ovat tyypiltään sellaisia, että vaalien tulos ei ole oikaistavissa. Tämän vuoksi vaalit on määrättävä uusittaviksi.”)
After this decision I am pretty sure we will not see any e-voting experiments in the near future. Proposing anything like that would be a political suicide.
Update: The decision is available here (in Finnish)
Creative Commons has release CC0 license that complements the Public Domain Dedication. Why yet another way to get your work into completely free use?
Apparently, some lawyers have raised issues with the public domain “dedication” or “certification” as it was worded. Indeed, the logic behind the dedication was US copyright law, which does not recognize inalienable moral components of copyright. The new “zero copyright” makes it clear that the dedication is only valid “to the extent allowable by [copyright] law” and that any other rights such as patents or personality rights are not affected. Ok, legally perhaps more clear but I don’t know if there is really any difference in practice. CC0 is essentially public domain in other words.
Today in the Pirate Bay trial media professor Roger Wallis, testifying for the defense, said he would not take any money for his testimony. Instead, he hoped that his wife would be sent flowers. And she did receive them! At the moment she has already received flowers worth over 30 000 Swedish kronor, meaning about 3000 euros or almost 4000 US dollars. More is pouring in. Wallis comments in an email: “I just don’t know how to handle the situation.” Of course, the flowers did not come from the court or the litigating parties but from people following the trial.
Something else has happened as well. A Facebook group “Roger Wallis is awesome” was created and got 411 members in a few hours. Another group “Roger Wallis for president” has 192 members and counting…
I think it’s the quid pro quo principle and the web 2.0 phenomena at work here.
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The image above is from Salim Virji’s photostream at Flickr.
Some people have asked whether the Swedish defendants could get any help, hints or advice from the Finnish BitTorrent case where litigation started already in 2006 and is currently heard before the Finnish Supreme Court.
My brief answer: no. It is true that Finnish and Swedish copyright laws are almost identical, word by word, and the facts of the cases — the administration of a BitTorrent-tracker — are in par as well. Ok, in Sweden they also generated some ad revenue which they did not manage to do in Finland. And in Sweden they publicly laughed at take-down claims while in Finland they received only one, and complied with it. However, the main difference is how copyright law has been read. It is obvious that the identically worded copyright laws have been applied very differently in each case. Let me compare them briefly:
1. Finland (as charged, and accepted by a district and appeals court)
- 32 admins (about half released, some 10 left appealing at the supreme court)
- administration = direct copying and distribution; no aid or conspiracy (yes, you read it correctly)
- covers every work and every infringing act (believe it or not…)
- about 0.5 million euros in damages (charge was 5 million) plus almost as much in legal costs
2. Sweden (as charged)
- 4 admins
- administration = aid and conspiracy to distribution; no direct acts, no copying
- covers only listed 37 works
- about 10 million euros in damages
You could have guessed based on the subtle differences in facts that the defendants should have won most of their charges in Finland. But that has not been the case. As you can see, the Finnish case has been much broader than what they have even tried to claim in Sweden. Thus, we in Finland will use the Swedish case to argue for the defense before the Supreme Court. We really hope to limit our case at least to the extent the prosecutor and copyright holders have already done in their claims in Sweden. But it is obvious that vice versa our case does not help the Swedes at all.
Helsinki Administrative Court gave today its decision on the e-voting appeals. Turre Legal represented 16 individuals from three municipalities who appealed the e-voting results from municipal elections held last October. The Administrative Court accepted the fact that 2% of votes cast were lost and not counted at all due to a number of errors in the e-voting system. However, the court accepted the voting result noting the following (same text for all municipalities, just italics added):
The feature, that if one took the e-voting card from the machine too early the voting process was interrupted without a notice, may be considered an issue. However, almost 98% of e-votes cast in the municipality of Kauniainen succeeded. A little over two percent failure rate can not be considered as such as a proof that the voting official would have acted erroneously… The threshold for conducting new elections must be substantial also taking into account governmental constitutional rights.
(“Sitä käyttöliittymän ominaisuutta, että äänestyskortin ennenaikainen poistaminen äänestyslaitteesta keskeytti äänestyksen siitä mitään ilmoittamatta, voidaan pitää puutteena. Kuitenkin lähes 98 prosenttia sähköisistä äänestyksistä onnistui Kauniaisissa. Hieman yli kahden prosentin epäonnistumisten määrää ei sellaisenaan voida pitää osoituksena siitä, että vaaliviranomainen olisi menetellyt virheellisesti.… Kynnyksen vaalien uudelleen toimittamiselle on oltava huomattava myös valtiollisten perusoikeuksien toteuttamisen kannalta.”)
So it was a feature, not a bug. Yes, I have heard that one before, was it from Microsoft PR?
It is now also an official fact that 2% of votes cast were lost because of these “features”. So what? Almost 98% were counted after all! Great. Except that this was the last time I voted.
And “governmental constitutional rights” as a legal argument. This is the first time I have heard of them. I thought the citizens have individual constitutional rights — like the right to vote as stated in the Finnish constitution, section 14 — against unreasonable state overpower to begin with. The last time I checked our constitution did not grant any specific rights to the state.
We will of course appeal this decision. A new and final one is expected from the Supreme Administrative Court before the summer.
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Here are Electronic Frontier Finland’s comments on the subject
Finnish Supreme Court has denied leave of appeal in the CSS case. Decision of the Helsinki Court of Appeal is therefore final.
Supreme Court does not give any arguments why an appeal is denied. Possible practical reasons include that (1) the case started as provocation, (2) it was highly political, and (3) there was no real legal interests as the defendants were acquitted from all charges (albeit for different reason) by the Court of Appeal. Having a new ruling just on court reasoning or the reinterpretation of facts is admittedly rather difficult to have.
So yes, my prediction on Supreme Court precedent was wrong, and the case is basically closed. We might still try the European Court of Human Rights based on freedom of speech arguments, but that’s pretty far away from where we are now.
On the positive side, there is no binding legal precedent on the issue whether viewing DVDs on Linux is legal. My opinion is that applying the correct facts to the legal interpretation of the Court of Appeal the circumvention of CSS scrambling for DVD viewing is indeed legal in Finland.
Kuten blogeissa ympäri maailmaa onkin jo ehditty raportoimaan (Lessig, EFF), Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on vahvistanut USA:ssa avoimen lähdekoodien lisenssien pätevyyden. Tapauksen merkittävyyttä lisää ensinnäkin se, että alioikeus oli päätynyt tapauksessa päinvastaiseen lopputulokseen. Toiseksi päätös osoittaa, että avoimien lisenssien merkitys ohjelmistoliiketoiminnalle on selkeästi ymmärretty myös tuomioistuinlaitoksessa – tässä tapauksessa vielä USA:n kaikista IPR-myönteisimmässä foorumissa. Päätöksessä mm. hehkutetaan avoimen lähdekoodin lisensointia:
Open source licensing has become a widely used method of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades ago. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of uses a Creative Commons public license for an OpenCourseWare project that licenses all 1800 MIT courses. Other public licenses support the GNU/Linux operating system, the Perl programming language, the Apache web server programs, the Firefox web browser, and a collaborative web-based encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Creative Commons notes that, by some estimates, there are close to 100,000,000 works licensed under various Creative Commons licenses. The Wikimedia Foundation, another of the amici curiae, estimates that the Wikipedia website has more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 9,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages
Oikeudellisesti päätöksen mielenkiintoisin osuus on covenant/contract-osuus, josta (ehkä) myöhemmin lisää.