Finnish campaigners seek crowdsourced change to copyright legislation | Hacker News Reader

Finnish campaigners seek crowdsourced change to copyright legislation

wired.co.uk

66 pointszxcdw9 comments

As a Finn I don't hold my breath over that the the vote, if it gets to a point parliament can vote on it (which I hope it does), will make a difference. Most likely it will be shot down by the Government parties as the copyright holders lobby-machine has quite strong influence. To make matters worst, most of the parties MPs vote what the party says them to vote regardless what the individual MP seems to be thinking.

Don't get me wrong, of course I want that the vote will pass, but I'll rather see the vote being 'shot down' than not have it at all. At least it will generate (more) discussion. We can always start the process over until we can get a positive outcome.

Now that I think this more, the timing might actually be just right for this to make a real impact as the the 9-year old girls confiscated Winnie The Pooh laptop case should still be fresh in peoples memories..

The problem is that 99.99% of these motions to propose a new law are not written by people who understand parliamentary procedure and drafting of valid motions.

passing a new law may require altering existing law or striking down old laws - the "conseqensials" get this wrong and you will lose.

and there the whole question of time tabling if the government can control when the motion is time tabled it might fall off if time runs out if they schedule it at the end of session for example.

This has about as good chances of succeeding as the US Death Star project.

Does anyone have an example, worldwide, of any of these petitions being successful in effecting change? (I'm not implying here that it has or hasn't happened)

This is much more than just a petition, though, even compared to a White House petition, which still has almost no chance of solving anything, other than receiving a patronizing and vague response, if that. The proposals in this "petition" get on the floor in Parliament it seems (if it passes the 50,000 mark), and they have to vote on it.

I really like the idea, and I wish more countries adopted this. If you're not a big fan of direct democracy and citizen-referendums like in Germany, this one still allows the representatives to have the final say on it. So nothing changes from the republic point of view, but it does offer regular citizens much better access to the Parliament and getting it to vote on laws they care about.

Of course they can still vote no, and they might, but that's why you need to build enough awareness and also try to change the politicians' mind on the issue.

But are there any examples of one of these issues getting to Parliament and successfully voted on? (as in voted in support of the motion)

In Finland, there hasn't yet been a vote about a petition in Parliament. The first petition with enough signatures was submitted in October, and the signatures will first have to be verified.

or if its a badly worded motion/petition it would have to pass the rules for validity according to the rules of the finish parliament and if it failed that it wouldn't even get on the order paper let alone moved.

In Brazil, a new law can be proposed by regular people if it gets one million signatures. While congress doesn't have to vote these proposals (they can basically postpone voting them forever), some of these have indeed become law.

The most recent one was proposed in 2009 and became law in 2010, changing the requirements to run for office (making them somewhat tougher on corruption).

PS: That law was nicknamed "Ficha Limpa". Something like "Clean Slate".

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