...members of Parliament got ever so slightly cold feet last week and wanted to postpone the final vote a little and amend the proposal to include even some small protection of fair use rights, they all apparently reached a "compromise"... -- Ah, I see the Reg has that bit, about the "appended note". But, the way they put it in the papers I read may still have been even worse: Something like "Naah, we don't have to put that into the law itself; if it doesn't work out [i.e, if lots of people are getting sued for attempting to make fair use of their media -- C.R.C.] then we can always revisit the law to add that later, and this is all the guarantee that consumers need". Uuh... That of course begs the question: If they could add it later as easily as all that, then why the fucking Hell couldn't they just as well put it in there *now*?!?

Personally, I think the Minister of Culture, Tanja Karpela -- an ex-model or something, one of those silly "celebrities" that the Finnish Parliament is full of, and lately known mainly for having had a relationship with former leader of the Conservative party and minister of Finance, Sauli Niinistö -- had invested too much of her prestige into making Finland the star pupil of the class by being first to fully conform to some new EU directive (a copy of the DMCA, dictated by the RIAA and MPAA); so much that she just *had* to ram-rod it through as-is, or lose a politically unacceptable amount of face.

(I must admit, though, that I'm not *quite* sure of this; unfortunately, I don't follow Finnish politics all that closely.)

...the wider perspective and the long run -- we're drifting towards a system of so-called "nation-states" which in reality are mere provinces of a huge Brussels-based bureaucracy known as the EU -- and B), the EU itself -- despite occasional attempts by various European politicians to raise their profile by being "Anti-American", usually in connection with elections in their "nation" provinces -- pretty much follows the US by the apron strings.

The subject of this thread is a perfect example of that; it's the Yanks' stupid DMCA (or wasn't there a more draconian version, "Son of DMCA" or "DMCA II", on the table? If so, then it's probably this) that we're implementing... So if I want to influence "politics in the country [I am] living and bringing up [my] kid in", the best way to do that, AFAICS, would actually be trying to influence *US* politics. And THAT is why I follow US politics almost as much, or perhaps more than, I do Finnish.

(Another reason for me not to follow Finnish poolitics is, of course, that they're usually conducted *in* Finnish.)