Current Affairs
25 March 2009The copyright mess
Some of you will of heard of the phrase “section 92a” of the Copyright Act. Others might have no idea what it means, so I’m here to help.
Last year, New Zealand’s copyright law was being updated and rewritten, to better reflect challenges faced by IP holders in this digital age. Faced with ever-growing piracy of its intellectual property, the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) met with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Telecom, Vodafone and TelstraClear to work out new ways to punish repeat copyright infringements.
The result was section 92a of the new copyright law. Essentially, it allowed copyright holders like RIANZ to present evidence to an ISP that one of its users had been seen downloading or uploading illegal material. If three such cases were found against a user, the ISP would be forced to terminate that entity’s internet connection.
Naturally, people found a lot to protest about. There was no system for third-party or judicial arbitration and so no effective way of appealing. This led to the phrase “guilt upon accusation” amongst protestors. There was concern that entire businesses (or schools, or hospitals) could lose their internet access based on the actions of an individual within the organisation. Similarly families might lose their service through the actions of one individual. Concerns were also raised about the new law running afoul of contract law.
ISPs didn’t like it because they were stuck in the middle of two potentially angry groups. On the one hand, they risked alienating their customer base by forcing disconnection, and on the other, being too lenient would incur the wrath of the major industries involved. There was no provision to protect ISPs from lawsuits from either of these groups.
Online, groups such as InternetNZ began a “blackout” protest to raise awareness of the changes due to become law in late February. It was picked up by high-profile English actor Stephen Fry, helping the debate penetrate the international news circuit.
Thankfully, the Government took notice. It first delayed the law’s implementation until late this month, and then this week announced it was scrapping the plan and rewriting it from the ground up.
As a reporter at Ars Technica pointed out, the law was “vague in wording…[requiring] the disconnection of repeat copyright infringers but [saying] nothing about the mechanism”.
This is a good chance to hash out a law that is fair to all the parties, whether copyright lobby groups, ISPs, or end users. Of course, it’s going to be amazingly difficult to reach a consensus, but let’s hope we wind up with something better than what section 92a was going to be.
Piracy is obviously rampant, even in a country like ours with second-rate broadband. But how much has to be given up in the fight against it? If you have an opinion on the law, and what it could be replaced by, post below.
Tristan Clark - Technical Writer
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Comments
I had agree with people protesting against this as from what the author presents any three cases against a user (knowingly or unknowingly) can mean an utter disaster for his internet service. My opinion was that though it was a good intent with which this idea intitiates it was a very immature to think about a solution as described above. The government rightly stalled the decision.
Not everyone who has internet connection at home today knows about securing their computer. Also, statistcs show that even the people that use computers in their day to day life are not good enough at this aspect. This might lead to cases where the actual user has never accessed anything via his connection but a hacker has routed packets through.
Surely, this problem is a bigger scale issue and to solve this I had recommend a standard in applying copyright to the content delivered on the internet. This might be inform of some meta information about the document and its owner and this meta inforamation is a bundle stored like DNS stores IP addresses. Some central location where copyright information gets stored. This might be as easy as just maintaining the web site information itself. When some content is acquired by someone else, the meta information gets updates to the new owner. But also, the drawback of such an approach is that, the information is huge. But I believe if we solved the internet, we can solve this puzzle as well. Infact, we should be able to leverage the internet technology idea to solve this. What I mean by internet technology idea here is the way DNS works and the way an IP address gets resolved and information gets accessed.
This was a poorly written excuse of a law as there ever has been in the history of NZ Govt. We already have legal mechanisms in place to deal with copyright infringement. Isn't this a case of just expanding those rights to cover the Internet as well?
Obviously, the recording industry, can't take us all to court, so they've been lobbying for something far more dramatic. Putting pressure on ISPs to become copyright policeman isn't the answer. Neither is setting up a 'meta bank' to store all original copyright material etc. That'd cost millions. And for what? The last thing anyone needs right now is mort cost. If Microsoft and a gazillion other software developers can't solve this issue - I can't see the NZ Govt coming close to it either. So it looks like the staus quo will remain for sometime yet.
Jennian NZ no1 Home Wrecker, Our house - Your problem. Beware of endemic rip offs, unskilled/poor workmanship, contract breach, contemptuous confrontational attitude, negligence, lies, threats, legal costs …, build with Carver’s Cowboys and suffer
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