*sigh*

The Finnish government voted yesterday to make it illegal to copy media, even for personal use, if you have to subvert copy protection to do so… under the new laws, not only will copying for personal use become illegal, so will possessing, distributing or advertising tools that break copy protection. P2PNet points out that the law prohibits even “organised discussion” of such things.

Sorry, meant to add a bit. To demonstrate how insane this is, let’s say you ripped your CD collection using Windows Media Player 18 months ago, and didn’t realise that by default it used WMA and added copy protection to your files. Now, you’ve got an iPod, so you download a utility to convert the protected WMAs to MP3 or AAC instead. Boom. You’ve broken the law.