Kai Puolamäki
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Kai Puolamäki is a Finnish physicist and Internet activist. He has been a vocal spokesman of the Finnish anti-copyright movement.
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[edit] Academic career
Puolamäki graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1996. In 2001 he presented his doctoral thesis titled Breaking of R-parity and supersymmetry in supersymmetric models. His earlier publications in physics have included articles on the Higgs boson.
Since 2003 his publications have concentrated on information technology and pattern recognition. He now works as researcher (equivalent to a North American assistant professor) at the Helsinki University of Technology in the Laboratory of Computer and Information Science (the former laboratory of Professor emeritus Teuvo Kohonen).
[edit] Internet activism
Puolamäki is a founder and board member of Electronic Frontier Finland, the Finnish counterpart to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has written many of the groups position papers. He has been a regular expert witness on copyright issues at the Finnish Parliament.
He has coined the term "copyright commandeering" to refer to instances of misuse of claims of exclusive rights under copyright. In 2006 he started the Anti-Commandeering Investigation, Training and Resources centre modeled on Anti-Piracy Investigation, Training and Resources centre of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) to register instances of copyright commandeering.
In addition to blogging, he regularly contributes to the Finnish language sfnet.* and finet.* Usenet hierarchies. He is the unofficial maintainer of the finet.* hierarchy. [1]
[edit] Copyright commandeering
Copyright commandeering (Finnish: Tekijänoikeuskaappaus) is a term coined by Kai Puolamäki to describe the misuse of false claims of copyright.
Forms of copyright commandeering include:
- Someone claims copyright on material in the public domain, or other material he does not own.
- Public domain or other free material is distributed under DRM.
- Copyright owner tries to enforce restrictions on the use of the copyrighted material beyond those mandated by the applicable copyright law.
- Owner of web site tries to enforce restrictions on deep linking to a web page.
Copyright commandeering is usually successful because no nation has laws criminalizing false statements about copyrights. Also, few people are competent to give legal advice on the copyright status of commandeered material. Another factor is the almost nonexistent threshold of originality required by United States copyright law. A public domain work with minimal or trivial alterations may claim copyright. Even a statement on the possibility of alterations will in many cases deprive the public of its legal rights to the material.
[edit] Examples of copyright commandeering
- Labels on CDs and DVDs forbidding all copying in jurisdictions where copying for private use is explicitly allowed by law.
- Web sites that contain copies of Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, which is in the public domain due to having been first published in 1911, that claim copyright to the material.
- Edita website financed by the Finnish government that claims copyright on Finnish statutes. [2]
