antti.vilpponen.net

South Park Studios has done something remarkable today. They have made all of South Park’s episodes availble on their website - to anyone in the world, not just the US. There have been numerous examples where movie studios and tv channels have given audiences the possibility to watch shows online, but they are usually limited to the national level, due to legal issues.

It will definitely be interesting to see how South Park’s success will pick up in the near future and what sort of traffic they will be reaching when all the pirate downloads are suddenly made obsolete.

I had the pleasure of having lunch with the former supreme administrative court justice Lauri Tarasti last week. He is writing a suggestion on the governance of the Finnish copyright law to the government of Finland and he wanted to hear my opinions on the law based on my work during the renewal of the law in 2005.

What I found interesting about him was the casual manner in which he went about, but he could afford it due to the massive understanding of the governance of issues in the Finnish judicial system. We went about discussing the backgrounds of the law, as one needs to understand the law to some degree before you can suggest who should be in charge of it. I told him about Lessig’s work in the US and how this has affected my thinking of the law and the matter in total. To my surprise when we discussed about the lenght of the current copyright law, he already knew of the Mickey Mouse theory.

However, I must say that our work during the autumn of 2005 was not in vain. A group consisting of four ministers, MO Justice, MO Education, MO Communications, MO Trade and Industry, has been formed to broaden the base on which these important decisions are made. Before, in 2005 more precisely, the sole decision of the law was made by the minister of education, Tanja Karpela - which we can all remember was very one sided and poorly prepared. Therefore I could conclude that we did manage to get something done!

It was a very interesting lunch with Mr Tarasti and he promised me to send the results of his work in May once he gets them ready. I’ll try and post the results as soon as I can.

I heard some very exciting news just a moment ago; Sony BMG drops DRM!

The fight that I was involved in as well through Olen Rikollinen? -campaign was not carried out in vain. All the largest record labels have finally dropped DRM (or have publicly announced to do so).

This just made my day.

That’s Hans Rosling going on about how we destroy our planet. He’s one of my new heroes :) The other two are definitely Kevin Rose and Evan Williams - two guys who have done incredible things online in terms of social web.

It’s 3.19 am, been awake for almost 24 hours, it’s time to get a few hours sleep and go conferencing again tomorrow. Like my friend said, or almost accused me of - I do actually do feel being here a bit like being in a candy store.

Yet another excellent presentation by Larry. This one’s from TED.

Kauppalehti “reports” that Universal, the movie company, states the decline in agricultural revenue is due to roaming P2P networks. The logic is that as people go to movies less, there is less popcorn to be sold. Mmm’kay. The P2P networks that are in question include (seriously, I’m not making this up): Torrent, Napster and eMule. Last time I checked Napster was legally in the music business. Oh well, small misquotes happen to all of us…

Read the full article here (and here’s a screencapture to prove it).

This is pretty phenomenal - Taloussanomat, one of the largest business papers adopts Creative Commons licensing in their articles. Hooray! They apparently began to license all their articles with CC: BY-NC-ND license.

I’ve been a strong supporter of Creative Commons ever since learned of Lessig and the movement. Later on I helped the US Freeculture movement by designing a logo for them. It seems that they still use it - I piled the three legos on our dinner table and snapped a photo of them, little did I know it they would be so famous :)

Anyhow, correct me if I’m wrong but this is the first time in Finland that a major news company adopts a Creative Commons licenses. A good day for Finland, a very good day.

Update: They still Copyright news from STT - ironically I found this out through an article discussing piracy/copyright criminals.

I went to see Matt talk at an Aula event tonight with a friend. Matt has been working for example for BBC as a software engineer putting all their “back catalogue” (as they say in the media business) online into a searchable archive that is interlinked with lots of hyperlinks. He’s talk was about Open Data, which is sort of a mixture of Open Source and Open Content. Yet another interesting talk and definitely worth while making the effort.

I also managed to talk to Janne briefly about the music business, DRM and open content - have to catch up on that later!

Update: There’s now a video available here.

The Russian allofmp3.com has taken a leap forward in customer service. They have released allTunes - which is a software package for your PC and S60 -phones to browse and buy music from their catalogs.

I know this service is a bit questionable as they probably don’t pay royalties to the artists, but you have to agree that these guys are pretty good at innovating their service and constantly making it more customer friendly. There’s a lot the recording industry could learn from this laissez faire company and their pricing models. I’m sure these guys are doign good business and reaching lots of people through these services.

Read more at TechCrunch.

If you’re in Finland - do watch telly next tuesday around 4pm (YLE TV2). I was today in a filming for YLE’s Farmi program. They’re doing a special on open source and the new copyright law. I was one of the people they interviewed for it.

The creators of the show seemed pretty understandable of our cause and that’s always good (meaning we oppose the new legislation). We did a 3 minute interview and probably the show will end with nukeing of a copyrighted CD :) You can see the girl filming the CD burning in the microwave and the interviewer watching it :)

Anyhow, I’ll post my part of the interview here once I get it myself.