Some of the readers may have noticed that the last post was made by Mikko Möttönen. He is a famous wresling doctor, a good friend of mine and X-American Finn. Mikko worked last summer as a post doc at Berkeley doing research on quantum computing. Mikko's famous quotes are "kiusallista" and "vakavia plagiointi syytteitä".
In 2000, a Finnish IT company TJ Group announced a large scale stock issue, the result of which was that the main stock holders Jyrki Salminen and Tuomo Tilman, who were also running the company, walked away with 130 million euros in total. After the stock issue, the price of the stocks droped to be under 1/100 of the price in the issue. Economically not so big thing was that I personally lost thousands of dollars---money to Jyrki's and Tuomo's pocket. Recently, Jyrki and Tuomo were fined for delaying the announcement of information about the results of the company before the issue. The fines were only about 7000€ each. After buying fancy sport cars and other luxuries these fines just make the guys laugh. They can pay a noticeably part of the fines just with the money I gave them in the issue. Here in Finland, people think I was stupid to invest in the company. In the States on the other hand, they would say I am now experienced. As painful as it is to know that Jyrki and Tuomo got a way with their trick, at least I can console my self with the fact that I was not the only one who lost and that I was still wise enough to sell the stocks after their value had dropped 40%, not 99% as my friend did. What can everybody learn about this? Sometimes you just have to admit that you made a wrong decision and the sooner you do that the better.
First the ministry of culture drafts an awful copyright law that even their specialists can't interpret. Then they outsourced the PR and education to the hands of Finnish anti-piracy people. These people have produced a comic full of accusation and moral ethos with little facts. The script of the book was written by one of the most active copyright lobbyist in Finland. The comic book along with some slides is being distributed to school teachers to use to educate teens. While the material is meant for wide distribution, the PDF version of the comic has DRM, that forbids copying or printing of the file. Smart move guys for PR material... not!
In less than 24 hours after the piraattitehdas revealed the site a parody version of the site was born. Anne Hitek-Kerho sent me this comic which is a hilarious parody of the propaganda PR effort. Download copycontrollinarvoitus.pdf
Funny thing... my spelling-checker suggest that piraattitehdas should be written "prostitutes" : )
