If the Shoe Fits…
Some of you might remember an incident last fall in Finland, when the computer of a small child was confiscated when she allegedly had downloaded ONE song of the finnish artist Chisu?
The girl’s father refused to pay the 800€ (if my memory serves me right) plus sign the non-disclosure agreement requested. The result: police crashed in, also trying to get the father to pay and took the computer, and the whole thing was all over the place in the press.
Here is a link (in Finnish) to one story YLE, our national broadcasting company, did on the matter.
As the whole thing was so out of proportion as can be, it caused quite a roar in the national papers — and I think it also made the international headlines.
The organization pursuing this was The Anti-Piracy Centre of Finland (TTVK); defending their actions in the name of copyright (although the artist would not get one cent of the demanded 800€). There had been dozens of other cases where the “accused” had quitely paid the sum requested and signed the non-disclosure deal.
I agree, copyright is an important concept and it should be protected to our best abilities.
The part I don’t understand
But here it gets confusing. The same TTVK runs a website piraattilahti.fi
Now, do I understand this correctly: the very same organization is running a website where you can access torrets freely? Which they claim is totally legal?
(Edit: Which, when I look at it a bit more later, is sort of irony/parody… of a pirate ship sinking… yeah,yeah… I know, don’t tell me a joke now or I laugh in the church on Sunday)
But I am even more surprised when I look at the source code of this website, it’s CSS section: it looks like it’s copy-pasted from the CSS of the Swedish Pirate Bay.
The screengrab on the right is from their main page and the CSS-page it links to at the top of this post.
Those not familiar with coding: CSS is a part of the code which controls the formatting, i.e. how a website looks like. It is not actual content (text, sound, pics) but instructions how those elements should be laid on a page.
So here is my dilemma: there is something ironic (at least to my mind) when the very instance who is pretending to defend copyright rips off code from Pirate Bay Sweden — which is the “source of all evil” in their rhetoric — to run their own site.
Maybe I just don’t understand… Or maybe it has nothing to do with copyright, it’s just good way to run business?
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(Edit: please read the first comment. But there’s still sort of irony to it…)
2 Replies to “If the Shoe Fits…”
You are partly correct in this matter. Piraattilahti used to be a mirror site for thepiratebay once Finnish isp’s banned the access. Apparently the site was taken over by TTVK and they now use it to promote different paid services. No torrents around there. Stealing the css file is just sad…
Thanks Juha; that might explain some of this.
As I said, I didn’t understand this — maybe now a bit more. But have to say, there is still some irony in this at least :-)