The National Research Institute of Legal Policy of Finland (Optula) has just come out with the results of its large survey charting various illegal or forbidden activities among the Finnish 9th grade (15 year old) schoolchildren. This is already the sixth survey of its kind but interestingly the researchers included this year also unauthorized downloading among the 'forbidden' activities charted. The results show that net piracy is highly popular in this age group, topping the chart of illegal or forbidden activities. 29% of the study target group practiced unauthorized downloading daily, 69% had done it at least once during the previous year, and 74% had done it at least once in their lifetime. Two out of three persons reported having at least 100 illegally downloaded files on their computers. Two thirds of the downloaded content was music while movies was the next most popular content type.

Piraattipuolue, the Finnish Pirate Party, reached an important milestone last Tuesday when the Finnish Registry of Associations granted it the status of a registered association. The Finnish pirates had been keenly waiting for this formal acceptance as they will now be able to start their campaign to collect 5,000 supporter cards required to get their party into the Register of Political Parties. There are fourteen registered political parties in Finland at the moment, eight of which have seats in Parliament of Finland.

The political pirate movement keeps spreading, and Scandinavia is to be one if its solid international strongholds. The movement was initiated by Swedish pirates led by Rick Falkvinge in January 2006, and now two of Sweden's neighbours, Finland and Denmark, are getting their own Pirate Parties. The Finnish Piraattipuolue will be officially founded in the coming weekend at a meeting in Tampere, Finland. The Danish Computerworld magazine reports that the Danish Piratpartiet has already been founded. Both parties will have an agenda following closely that of the Swedish Piratpartiet. The next great political opportunity and challenge for the European pirate movement will be the EU Parliament election to be held in June 2009.

Finnish Copyright Information and Anti-piracy Centre (CIAPC) toughens its fear campaign against filesharers. CIAPC has now used the new Finnish copyright law from January 1st 2006 to close an internet connection because of suspected filesharing. It came as a surprise to even CIAPC itself that the closed connection did not belong to a private filesharer but instead to the Provincial Government of Åland. A government employee had seemingly used the connection to share music.

The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) has published the results of its large p2p study based on an online poll of over 6,000 participants. The results show that the new stricter Finnish copyright law enabled year 2006 (coined as Lex Karpela according to Tanja Karpela who was the Minister of Culture at the time) has had only a minimal effect on filesharers. Only 10% of P2P users reported that the new copyright law had at least somewhat decreased their P2P usage.