Greece, Denmark (and no-one else) make EC copyright deadline (Register) [LWN.net]

The Register reports that Greece and Denmark have signed up for the European Union's controversial Copyright Directive (AKA Europe's DMCA). "It's best to see this as a delay -rather than a derailment - of the controversial measures, fiercely advocated by the film and music industry. The software industry, most notably the Business Software Alliance (BSA), has also lobbied hard for the introduction of the directive as an important means to fight piracy. It's unhappy that new-piracy fighting laws have failed to materialise by Christmas."

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Oh fuck!

Posted Jan 2, 2003 21:25 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

I live in Denmark and I'm starting to hate the way our politicians act, how is it that they can bring them selves to enact a law that will only hurt the citizens that have put them in office?

I guess there is nothing else to do than either ignore the law or move outside the country, with a tax pressure of well over 60% (25% VAT + 50% income tax), no sun, the worlds most expensive cars (> 200% tax) and insane gasoline prices (~1 EUR pr. liter), this country is really getting too fucked up to keep tolerating!

When a small, generally non-corrupt, democracy like ours can have laws injected by companies that don't even pay taxes in this country what sort of chance does the rest of world have against the megacorps?

There is one small hope: The law (as fucked up as it is) does say that you can be allowed to circumvent the usage-impairing mis-features if your use falls within fair use and the copyrightholder doesn't provide you with the means to exercise your rights, however this does involve an institution that has no deadline for its work, so it's a safe bet that this will be useless for the normal citizens.

The law also contains an other, much more troubling clause: The ban on imported material that the copyright holder does not want distributed here (like region 1 DVDs), hopefully this will be thrown out as it is against other EU laws.