Tag Archive for 'journalism'

Finnish squirrel steals Kinder eggs

I found this Reuters story quite unbelievable, until I saw it with my own eyes. It seems the Kinder egg stealing squirrel from Jyväskylä has a cousin in Espoo:

Squirrel steals Kinder eggs, by Late, egg by Gargaj: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:KinderEgg.jpg CC BY-SA 2.5

Funny how all these stories have a picture of a Eastern Grey Squirrel although the most common squirrel in Finland is the Red Squirrel. Perhaps the grey squirrel most resembles a global stereotype of a squirrel and is therefore better for a news story. Who cares what color squirrels are in Finland anyway?!?

In more disturbing wildlife news, a camel kills wild ass at Helsinki Zoo. Tempting, but I’m not going to photoshop that chain of events.

OMG! Finnish fertilizer used in terrorist plot!

Fertilizer Bags - by etm21This is the most ridiculous headline I have read in a long time.

Men convicted in British terror plot planned to use Finnish fertiliser for bomb

OMG, they planned to use Kemira GrowHow’s Finnish fertilizer? Why is that information relevant? Who the hell cares? I bet Finnish Nokia mobile phones have been used as detonators in more than a dozen terrorist attacks. I think it would be real big news if the Al-Qaida NOC hidden in a cave in Afghanistan ran Linux, a Finnish innovation! Perhaps next week we’ll hear that Evil Terrorists are now buying meters of Marimekko fabric, stockpiling vast amounts of Iittala glassware and getting horribly drunk off Finlandia Vodka. Who knows, maybe the next big terrorist attack against the US will be inspired by a Renny Harlin movie. Now that would be big news.

Gottfrid Svartholm raided… a year ago

The Pirate BayTrust a digg article titled “PirateBay proprieter raided by Swedish police!”? Apparently somebody at ITviikko regularly scans digg.com for juicy headlines and figured this article must be big news since it has been dugg over 900 times. Gottfrid Svartholm, better known as anakata, now has a pretty blunt statement on his website:

Note to (stupid) DIGG users: This message is from LAST year! D’oh!

They removed the topic from ITviikko but it’s still available at digitoday.fi. Mistakes happen, even to topnotch journalists (not to mention enthusiastic diggers).

Taloussanomat adopts Creative Commons

Taloussanomat, a major Finnish financial newspaper, now uses CC BY-NC-ND
license on all their online articles (via Antti Vilpponen). They also have a page clearly explaining the license terms and information on how to use the license, along with a piece of html-code that you can use on your own site. This is pretty significant. It means that you can safely quote an entire article from their news service, or use it as part of another service. I like Taloussanomat every day more and more. Not counting the ad-infested frontpage (Adblock pretty much solves that problem), their website has everything you’d expect from a quality service.

I’m looking forward to the first online news service to use CC-licensed pictures from Flickr. I don’t get why they don’t do that already.

Great tabloid journalism – (pause) not!

Yesterday Finland’s sensational scandalmongering tabloid Ilta-Sanomat featured a typical overblown headline “Contestant attacks Idol judge” (Finnish). In the article they write that bodyguards had to drag out the furious contestant, Eric Chapman, who had pulled out a small object from his pocket and tried to attack Simon.

Judge for yourself. Having been rejected, Eric clearly says to Simon “Here, I have to do something, I have to fix your hair…” and then pulls out a tub of hair gel. The bodyguards then escort him out of the room, but barely touch him.

Why do professional journalists write such crap and get away with it? I’m sick and tired of these bullshit yellow press headlines. Somebody please shoot them. (Bad bad bad! Let’s not make jokes about shooting journalists.)

Mediaviikko comments on YouTube

Mediaviikko’s executive editor Paavo Vasala was kind enough to send me Mediaviikko’s article on YLE&MTV3 vs. YouTube (subscribers only) and even gave me permission to quote it. Awesome! This might be interesting for Finnish readers, so here’s the entire comment from Mediaviikko:

Yleisradion ja MTV3:n tiukka kanta Googlea vastaan on täysin oikea. Ohjelmat ovat televisioyhtiöiden teettämiä ja rahoittamia sekä omistamia. Niitä ei saa kukaan näyttää luvatta. Kun sen tekee taloudellista voittoa tavoitteleva yhtiö, kuten nyt Google, teko on erityisen tuomittavaa laittomana.

TV-yhtiöt ovat maksaneet työntekijöille sovitun palkan ja palkkion ohjelmien tekemisestä. Myös muita kustannuksia on syntynyt. Kun Google käyttää nyt hyväkseen toisen tekemää työtä, sitä voidaan pitää varastamisena. Tällaista ei saa kannattaa. Herättääkin suurta hämmästystä, kuinka varsin moni nettikeskustelija luulee, että kyse on televisioyhtiöiden tahallisesta kiusanteosta, kun kielletään ohjelmien luvaton levitys netissä. Kustannuksien jaosta on kyse lopulta.

Nettimaailma on väärällään erilaisia virityksiä toisten tuotteiden anastamiseksi, mistä Suomessakin esillä olleet tekijänoikeuslain valmistelun aikaiset riidat ovat osoituksena. Luulen, että oikeustaju on kuitenkin tallella suurimmalla osalla kansasta. Eräillä vain oma ahneus iskee niin pahasti päälle, että ohjelmien ja muiden esitettävien tuotteiden tekijänoikeuksista ei paljoa piitata. Onneksi yhä enemmän netissä tapahtuva tuotevälitys on laillista myyntiä ja pelisäännöt ovat tulleet tutuiksi.

I’m sorry I don’t have time to translate the whole comment, but in brief, Vasala agrees with YLE and MTV3. He thinks that now that Google is benefiting financially from the illegal use of copyrighted material on YouTube, it can be called theft and should not be tolerated. He mentions that “The Internet is full of devices whose purpose is to steal the work of others, the row over the new Finnish copyright law demonstrates this well. Some are so greedy, that they don’t care about the copyrights of software or other products.”

To be continued. Vasala does it again – he calls copyright law critics criminals whenever he gets the opportunity. Opponents of the copyright law don’t support piracy, they want more rights for consumers. The Finnish copyright law has various points that need to be corrected. According to the 2006 copyright bill (edited from Afterdawn.com):

  • Circumventing copy protections is illegal, even for personal use.
  • Distributing tools that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms is illegal.
  • Advertising tools that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms is illegal.
  • Possession of tools that allow circumventing copy protection mechanisms is illegal, even for personal use.
  • Guides on how to circumvent copy protection mechanisms can be considered as “tools” and thus are also illegal.
  • Worryingly, even “organized discussion” on how to circumvent copy protection mechanisms, is illegal.

So, if you have a portable MP3 player and a copy-protected CD, you can’t legally copy the CD to your MP3 player anymore. Got Linux? Forget about installing libdvdcss to watch DVDs – you’d be breaking the law.

If I want to copy a CD to my MP3 player, does that make me a criminal? Talk about greed. Some are so greedy that they infest their products with copy-protection, just to make sure you won’t be able to use the product. Some are so greedy that they install rootkits on their CDs. Some are so greedy that they sell you DRM products online that could break at anytime. And yes, some hard-bitten evil pirates are so greedy that they download a 2min clip of Kummeli from YouTube for free, instead of bying the 6h DVD-set.

Mediaviikko commits suicide

Paavo Vasala, MediaviikkoI used to read Mediaviikko magazine online regularly. My interest was hightened a year ago, when they published a controversal and provocative editorial praising the new copyright law (see also Butt Ugly Weblog’s analysis in English). In brief, the editorial contained numerous mistakes, factual errors and outright lies. The editorial gained many comments in a short time, most just pointing out errors. Mediaviikko abruptly removed all the comments, claiming they were “too profane” and started to moderate all further comments on all their articles and editorials. If that wasn’t bad enough, they revised the original editorial in silence.

Mediaviikko continued to attack proponents of the new copyright law, labelling all critics as “pirates, criminals and propagandists” in their January 2006 editorial. In May 2006 Mediaviikko decided it was time for another PR-stunt. With the help of columnist Tuulikki Ukkola they defended the tabloid magazine Seiska’s decision to publish pictures of Lordi’s band members. That would have been acceptable, had they not likened Lordi fans with the SS-jugend and islamic terrorists.

Today I was eager to read Mediaviikko’s twist on the YouTube copyright infringement story. Their excerpt read “theft must end!” – so I was guessing they were up to no good once again. I wasn’t able to read their article however, because it turned out that only subscribed readers can now view their content. I could subscribe for “only” 99€. Well forget it.

I find it hard to believe that Mediaviikko will benefit from this. I don’t think that anyone will want to pay 99€ for their service, because:

  • Their news coverage is nothing out of the ordinary.
  • All the comments are moderated, so they have no real dialogue with the readers.
  • Their website just isn’t cool enough. There are no features that you would want to pay 99€ per year for.
  • Their reporters don’t blog.
  • Their website is way too dull and just way too ugly.

So, auf wieder sehen und bis bald, Mediaviikko.