Saturday 12 February 2005

Pic of the day: "What she says and what she does don't match up at all!" Screenshot from the copyrighted anime Mahou Sensei Negima. The choice of words is not entirely unrelated to this entry, nor is the choice of an anime picture, although the actual characters are.

Bill of Copyrights?

For some time now, the situation here in Norway has been that it has been legal to download copyrighted material such as songs, movies etc from the Internet, even when it originally came there by means of piracy. This is because according to current copyright laws, private use is legal, and copyright holders are compensated for this use by a stipulated sum. However, as more and more copyrighted material originates outside Norway, this system is just plain unfair. So I am glad to see it go, even though it technically will make me a lawbreaker.

I have no intention of giving up downloading and distributing moderate amounts of fansubbed anime, after all. This is stuff that you cannot get legally, because it is only available in Japanese and most people outside Japan don't understand Japanese. So until anime becomes common enough in English (and this is the way things move, gradually) I will continue the good work, legalities be darned. Or mended, in this case.

(Ironically, one of the most famous Magnuses in Norwegian history was the king Magnus Lawmender. Oh well. I'm sure I could have done that too, but I have a higher calling. Right?)

***

The troubling part is not that piracy now becomes illegal. The troubling thing is the small parts that the recording industry has managed to tack on the bill in the EU, which Norway will have to implement (after much foot-dragging) if we want to keep up our free trade agreement with the Union. It will now become illegal to copy content to a different medium. You can copy a CD to another CD for private use, but not to an MP3 player. This is a completely new thought, implying that you have not bought the music but only the right to listen to it from a specified medium. If you want to listen to it in MP3 format, you have to buy it again. Yeah, right.

The police say that they have other priorities than checking people's MP3 players. The spokesman for the recording industry keeps saying that they are not going after consumers, only distributors. But I don't think many believe him, because we know what they did in the USA: Sued teens and grandmothers, including people who didn't even have the computer equipment to commit the infractions they were accused of. Nice speeches are good, but as the hard and fast rule of psychology says: "Past behavior is the best predicator of future behavior." Admittedly Norway is not part of the USA, but the Norwegian recording companies ARE mostly part of international recording companies.

Oh well. If I am arrested for copyright infringement, I shall phone someone I trust with my password so you can stay updated of my fate! Hey, don't pray for it - I don't exist solely for your entertainment, you know, no matter how it looks!