Piracy Rampant Among Finnish Youth
Written by Ernesto on November 12, 2008A recently published survey on the ‘criminal’ habits among 15 year old Finns has revealed that more than two thirds of the youngsters have used file-sharing applications to downloaded copyrighted material. Online piracy was by far the most prevalent form of ‘criminal behavior’ among Finnish youth.
Anti-piracy lobby groups often point out that downloading copyrighted content equals stealing, most notably in their “You wouldn’t steal…” campaign. We have pointed out before, that stealing is not the right wording, and despite the fact that it’s against the law, many people don’t see it as a problem either.
A new survey, conducted by the The National Research Institute of Legal Policy, looked into the unlawful behavior of Finnish 9th grade youngsters, including their illicit downloading habits. Among other things, the results show that 6% of the 15 year olds smoke marijuana or hash, 11% has participated in a fight and 15% admits they have stolen something from their school.
Unsurprisingly, the most common type of illegal behavior among the group is (illegal) downloading. An overwhelming majority of the surveyed kids (69%) admitted that they have downloaded copyrighted material in the past year. Even more so, 29% reported that they use filesharing applications to download music and movies illegally, every day. However, it is worth pointing out that while bullying, stealing and vandalism might be considered a crime and therefore warrant the attention of the police, personal-use file-sharing is a civil infringement, and does not.
The Finnish news article which reported on the survey resulted in an massive response from readers. A spokesperson from the Finnish pro-piracy group Piraattiliitto told TorrentFreak: “There is an almost unanimous call from the readers to legalize private filesharing. The overwhelming change in the national opinion from anti-piracy to pro-piracy is somewhat surprising, even for us at Piraattiliitto.”
The Finnish copyright lobby on the other hand, says it is ‘alarmed’ at the outcome of the survey. It wants to see new laws that would allow copyright holders to force ISPs to pass their threatening emails to the alleged filesharing customers. The consensus among the readers, however, seems to be that, instead of turning millions of people (including 69% of 15 year-old kids in Finland) into law-breakers, copyright laws should be changed to allow casual piracy.
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30 Responses
EVAL CHILDRAN, LOCK THEM ALL UP111
(Finland, yay!)
I wonder why people still use file-sharing applications. I bought a Rapidshare premium account few months back and i’ve been downloading from Rapidshare ever since. Why? Pros: Files come as fast as my connection can handle, No waiting time for speed to pick up, No on comes crying to me saying i use any file-sharing applications. Cons: ?
I’ve lured all my friends to use Rapidshare as well. And i can’t even imagine how i ever lived without it.
Hahahaha look at this nub, that’s even worse than using torrents…
I agree with #2, if you know where to find it, rapidshare links are very handy and usually appear within 10 minutes of pre. No need to worry about upload speed or anyone spying on your online activity.
“casual piracy” – hard to define, perhaps it is better to go for “non-commercial exemption from all parts of copyright law except for the attribution part” or something like that.
The thing is, it shouldn’t be rampant among youth. It should be nearly universal among everyone. P2P has already shown itself to be a far better way for culture to be transmitted, and in this day and age, the people are the ones who have the better ability to transmit culture than the big companies.
Hopefully, this group of people can weigh in heavily on the copyright issue. Can it be hoped that such a swing of public opinion in regards to copyright law can happen in the U.S.?
I think that there shall eventually be the time where, universally, people will no longer even conduct studies on “who is sharing copyrighted works” and consider it normal, and not associate it with all of those other criminal activity in studies like this. When shall it be? Well, why should anyone wait for it? Is it not injustice itself for this copyright law to continue? When something is morally wrong, one does not wait for something to correct itself; rather, one fixes it. The idea of “waiting for justice” is a terrible idea, and it has already been too long. Can such justice, from Finland, spread to other countries? Even so, the most important country of all is still the United States in regards to copyright law.
Roze
http://www.10ch.org/
How much do they pay you rapidfags? People use P2P because we don’t parasites like rapidshare. They use P2P because they believe in free file-sharing and not spineless retards like the rest of you. How many people get “caught” anyway? Virtually nobody. You’re pathetic wimps who fell for the silly scare tactics of the copyright industry. Those hosting sites are frequently much slower than P2P anyway. Get a proper ISP or grow a brain if you’re too dense to configure your P2P apps to get fast transfer speeds.
Yay lets get some more crack, and some shitty movies that are shit.
GO FINLAND!!!
instad of those crappy UNLAWFULL lawproposals by the criminal lobbyists(the leader of mpaa is a pirate himself!) they should allow ISP’s to invest in their infrastructure to counter the increasing monstrous DDOS attacks aimed at their network and servers. those are real crimes! copyleft is no crime! if lobbygroups suffocate isp’s we will not have any isp’s left in a few years cause thei infrastructure is destroyed by ddos and flashdos(literally burning your memory) attacks
“69% ADMITTED” in reality 99.9(9)%
it’s stupid not to :)
“An overwhelming majority of the surveyed kids (69%) admitted that they have downloaded copyrighted material in the past year”
#11 is probably right that it is 99.99%. This article, even google’s home page is subject to copyright in many lands. To view it you must download it. Thus downloading of copyrighted material. I wonder how many of the 69% answered that way or interpreted the implied ‘knowingly without permission’
Wow TF, you are now deleting posts that impersonate other users.
how f*cking lame.
finland is winland
@10
yeah, like pictures at google…
no lets brain-wash everyone
http://www.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/pressmeddelande_regeringen_skickar_fildelningspropaganda_till_skolor
instead and get ipred laws
http://www.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/pressmeddelande_piratjagarlagen_ar_statligt_sanktionerad_utpressning
like sweden
i’m 14 and download TB’s worth of data. :)
Im happy when I see all criminals in jail but if they jail all young voters… Im finn and I think file sharing rocks and Kotilainen sucks…
@15 so you admiting to be a criminal?
pirates should be shot
I meant to say pirates should be shot, as in Commercial pirates.
File sharers are fine, commercial pirates are whats killin the industry.
I still don’t know if downloading for personal use is illegal in Finland. As far as I rember it’s all legal. Some puppet passed a law a couple of years ago that made it illegal to bypass DRM on CD’s and DVD’s. But they still have not decided what is DRM. And all that puppet does to this day is change “her soulmate” so often I wonder how she has had time for politics. Puppetmasters = FAIL!
About the surprising pro piracy reactions; atmosphere has indeed changed dramatically. Normally when Finland’s most recognized paper Helsingin Sanomat writes and article like this, anti-pirates have huge clash with pro-pirates. HS is also well known to be biased against piracy and it has a habit of spreading misinformation; comparing file sharing with stealing, associating downloading as criminal offence, interviewing only the anti-piracy groups and suggesting that downloading is known to get you sued, even through this has never happened in Finland. Almost unanimous pro-piracy reactions are rare in a paper like this.
Do Finns download a lot? Well, everybody I know does, including my whole family, but everybody also buys stuff so the balance of supporting the creators doesn’t sway with sharing. It’s not only about buying something that you like but also spending your money where you get the money’s worth; books, movies, shirts, e.g. Some friend say they buy a lot more because they find stuff that they like. VCR and cassette tapes didn’t destroy the culture and neither will digital piracy.
Download all before its impossible!
http://www.james-bond-quantum-of-solace.com/
What is even more interesting than the large 69% number is the 29% number. More than a quarter of the 15 year olds are filesharing daily. That is some great news, that the young are beginning to learn about the advantages of easily accessible information.
One thing I would like to see is a survey of how likely people are to continue filesharing as they grow older. From having seen statistics from several age groups I would guess that the likelyhood is high, but I havn’t seen that exact topic queried anywhere.
@ #2 you obviously never made it into a quality private tracker >:D
And here was me thinking the sweds were all good as gold. Must be that fresh getting to them!
http://www.aquariumfish.me
blablablablablalblablalbalabla
Roze
http://www.10ch.org/
@24
actually Finns and Swedish people are more alike than they like to admit. This comes from the fact that Sweden once ruled Finland in the past.
Hey MORONS!!!!!
Paying for Rapidshit is a joke.
Honestly, are you really that stupid to pay for pirated material? You might as well just go out and buy the real thing then. Using Rapidshare for free, however, is perfectly fine and can be useful for certain things.
More importantly: All other crimes have gone down among Finnish youngsters. I would take that as indication that Finns don’t consider copyright to be wrong.
lol guys, wtf is wrong with Rapidshare honestly? 15 months for 50 bucks or whatever it is and I get to download as much as I want on a college network that has banned P2P and throttled torrents. Download at 3MB/s compared to throttled 200k for torrents..yeah worth paying for. And yes, im on great private trackers like ef-tee-en…
So what if 69% of Finnish 15yo’s pirate movies? 69% of the population of Finland and Sweden pirate movies. Focus on the 32% who smoke weed, beat each other up and steal stuff.
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