Kiwis Delay Draconian File-Sharing Law
Written by Ben Jones on February 23, 2009There has been plenty of comment around the net about the ‘guilty-on-accusation’ law in New Zealand. Now after a week of online protests that got some ‘Quite Interesting’ support, the law has been delayed for another month.
First, a quick recap. Last year, the New Zealand government passed 3-strike legislation, aimed at having copyright infringers thrown off the Internet, based only on the accusations of those claiming copyright infringement.
Earlier this month a code of practice was drafted by the copyright holders and ISPs which should outline the manner in which the new Section 92 ‘3 Strikes’ regime should be handled by the ISPs. However, the parties involved couldn’t agree on the content of the code and Prime Minister John Key has just announced that the law has been delayed until a workable solution can be found. If the parties involved can’t reach an agreement, the law might be changed, he noted.
Most of the opposition is worried about the “Guilty Upon Accusation’ part of the law, and rightly so. Regular readers know how shoddy anti-piracy groups are at accurate take-down notices, either they’re for stuff that you can share, never had, or are incapable of having.
Last week, many people blacked out their profile images on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and today several bloggers announced a blackout of their entire website. The protest is being spearheaded by Creative Freedom, which was formed two months ago in response to this law – and not without success.
The protest caught the eye of many, including some celebrities. Stephen Fry, author of 7 novels, and a prolific screenwriter, actor, and presenter, is supporting the cause. “My picture is blacked out for good reason,” he twittered last week. The Quite Interesting Fry, ranked second most popular by twitterholic, was one of the first to black out his profile picture.
For now the protests have resulted in a delay of the law, perhaps not directly, but we are pretty certain that it would have been in effect already without all the opposition.
Previously: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
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30 Responses
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RD0OZCyJCk
Our local version of the RIAA, the RIANZ, wanted to soften the law to ‘guilty until proven innocent’ instead of just ‘guilty upon accusation’.
When the shitvampire moneyleeches at your local copyright holder representation organisation want to soften a copyright law, you know it’s bad stuff.
What Key has effectively done is answer the protest and the ISP complaints with an ‘are you sure?’ and now he’s stalling. He has no intention of changing this nefarious traitor law.
I disagree with this approach. Make the law even more draconian and tough. Make it zero strikes. Until people feel pain from Big Content in a way that makes what they’re doing real, people will keep giving them money. No boycotts will ever be effective, and blacking out a few web sites no one reads won’t matter. But if Joe Average starts getting disconnected from the Internet, or NZ business starts losing money from this stuff, then heads will roll and things will get done. A true boycott, where Big Content loses 95-100% of profits for a few months, would cripple them.
We may of won the battle but will we win the war?? OF COURSE WE WILL!!!
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TPB FTW
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The corporatocracy seems to be taking over the world. Intellectual Property laws have given the grey brigade way too much power. And the scary thing is that this power is still growing. This legal hell will kill our entire culture.
Does anyone even realize (care) that those proposals violate human rights? O_o
When was it i said that people should turn off htere internet for a month or two and why?
Ya now ya see i am way ahead of most of you on my ideas , that crazy ol chronoss what a nut eh?
Maybe a few of my ideas might go in hte long run. Trust me two months a 40% even refusing to pay the net cost on account of a law would get the ISPS howling large.
RIAA and MPAA don’t care about YOUR economy, just don’t mess with the jet and there million dollar homes.
got to love actors and musicians that aren’t speaking against it either. Interesting again.
Are you for or against file sharing.
Speak or forever be NO SALE.
P.S. its either fascism or plutocracy NOT corporatocracy that word does not exist and the two above fit as its being aided by a govt aka the USA.
remember hitler was elected to power
This delay is a huge relief to those running computers for public use.
Its basically peak tourist season in many areas in new zealand, and many internet cafes have been sweating under the collar because of this law.
Libraries have implemented some rather draconian filtering, and hostels/hotels with public access are in the same position as internet cafes.
Sooner it gets struck down the better.
#7 Think Again. Twice.
Fascism is oppresive rule, Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy. Corporatocracy is a popular term that means rule by the corporations. If you deny that that’s the case here, you’re obviously missing out on the state of the world big time.
Also, Hitler may have been elected, but this never happened in a democratic way.
google ACTA and look for wikipedia
anti-counterfeiting. Page down and look for ISP Cooperation. This is the future brought to you by:
Bush and
Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)[4]
Top four campaign contributions for 2006:
Time Warner $21,000
News Corp $15,000
Sony Corp of America $14,000
Walt Disney Co $13,550
All of the hoo hah being generated in norway, NZ and sweden is just the canary in the coal mine. After they enact this turd (ACTA), The ifpi/mpaa will be able to take your ipod at the airport and then shut down your broadband with no warrant.
rage.
“The protest is being spearheaded by Creative Freedom, which was formed two months ago in response to this law – and not without success.”
It does appear to be spearheaded by the Creative Freedom, and it seems like the idea has come about from a some forum-goers here:
forum (dot) vodafone (dot) co (dot) nz (slash) index (dot) php (question mark) showtopic=1567
“Does anyone even realize (care) that those proposals violate human rights?”
Nope, only a few people care, because even if it does violate basic human liberties, people just think that it is just some really unimportant deal about getting files for free, or something. Only a few people realize why this issue very important.
This law is oppressive, and thus is fascism plain and simple. And how makes these laws? The wealthy and corporate types with their so called legal bribes (party donations); therefore we have a disturbing mixture of fascism, plutocracy, and corporatism. This world is really going to the dogs.
How long before we rise up in revolution? The french aristocracy suffered the same fate.
Can anyone explain to me exactly what blacking out your profile picture would possibly do? .. i mean i HAVE to be missing something here because that seems like so.. i dont even know the word.. pathetic?
I mean.. nobody gives a rats ass about someones PROFILE.. and i would bet money people would even notice let alone CARE that someone blacked out there picture.. i mean seriously.. i must be so out of touch.. or these morons live in a fantasy world.
The erosion of civil rights has been
one of the self inflicted wounds inherited from the Bush administration. This has been a broad spectrum approach to combating a phony trumped up not even in the right place war. Hopefully Obama will address it, he has already made some progress with Guantanamo. I apologize for posting in this forum but Im just pissed. Fuck ACTA.
More dirty tricks in Ireland as well it seems.
http://www.state.ie/blog/illegal-music-sites-to-be-blocked-in-ireland/
The people here throwing around words like “fascist” and “plutocracy” are extremely misguided morons and I pity the way your brain functions if you are over the age of 15 as you really should know better.
Notice how the campaign against these laws or any TF articles regarding them have not mentioned the word “fascist” or “plutocracy” even once. To do so would make most people who live in the real world, not a self-deluded fantasy land like yourselves, not offer support the campaign because they would think the people involved to be either crazy or just plain ignorant and stupid and wouldn’t want to be associated with them.
NZ is a country founded on democratic principles. Under a fascist regime the type of open dissent being displayed here wouldn’t be allowed here. The democratically elected government is listening to people’s and business concerns and if they don’t it may be an issue that causes them to be voted out of power.
to #11 Thor
If you are saying that hard right conservative George W. Bush and flaming liberal Howard Berman are cooperating to fight against file-sharing, then we are truly in trouble!
@18 Conspiracy Crazies
What you miss is that they are not saying that fascism or plutocracy are already here, but is coming as a result of these draconian laws.
True, New Zealand, after all, is one of the most democratic nations on earth, scoring a 9.19 on the Economist Democracy Index, ranking as the 7th most democratic nation on earth (after Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland), and Freedom House also considers it a completely free nation, so that only someone living in a box would miss the fact that New Zealand is a free country, but the fact is that these draconian laws, which violate basic human rights, are very much in the spirit of fascism and plutocracy, introducing elements of fascism and plutocracy where before there was little or none.
@19 Jimmy
naw, what Im saying is that our rights will be eroded significantly if ACTA is enacted, this was done on BUSH’s watch as he did not feel we actually had any. Berman just is a paid flack for the entertainment industry which I suppose is to be expected.
Fight those fuckers and get that law dropped!
@Conspiracy Crazies
“The people here throwing around words like “fascist” and “plutocracy” are …”
Right on the money. If you think this 3-strikes legislation is neither fascist nor plutocratic, then you need to learn what the words fascist and plutocratic mean.
You’re right that New Zealand was founded on democratic principles, which means those who let this legislation pass are acting as traitors to their own country. Until they’re purged from the government, it can’t rightly be called a democracy.
I’m sure this is all lost on you and your two braincells, however.
Actually, the blacked out profile images was incredibly effective. The campaign was simmering along getting some traction, but it was the blackout that made it front page news.
I think it’s because people who’d never even heard of the issue suddenly noticed half their Facebook or Twitter friends’ faces turning into black squares. When they asked “WTF?” they started learning (a) what the issue was, and (b) how many people cared about it. Pretty soon they also blacked out their profiles and started following tweets and links and – hey presto! It became a truly viral protest.
Hats off to everyone involved – this was NZ’s first real taste of the power of online activism. Hopefully it won’t be the last.
NZ’s internet is like being in stone age.
It’s funny how France came up with the idea of 3 strikes and then they didn’t implement it but some other “democratic” nations are.
Why dont these oraganisation understand…..
theier old system of working is a thing of past !!!!
http://www.Urssiva.com
Hope they change..
Stone age is right.
Iv had to explain to quite a few foreigners the situation within new zealand.
In short:
‘we pre much have a monopoly situation, where one company owns most of the infrastructure and the only pipe out of the country’
Many are quite surprised and horrified to hear that.
Hey wow I just realized something. Well in NZ your allowed to breach copyright for the purposes of reviews and some other reasons. Well how do they know that your download was breaching copyright laws or not. All you need to say is that my download was strictly for the purposes of reviewing and therefore don’t cut of my internet or I see you in court for malpractice. And if you get caught uploading you say well excuse me uploading isn’t a crime. Because their are legitimate reasons that people could be downloading it from you which do not break the law (like reviews) and unfortunately you can not stop people downloading it illegally. And you can say you where unaware that anyone was downloading it illegally from you and that you think that they should prosecute them if they know it was illegal and have proof.
And because of this the law will never work. Because people could be downloading their copyrighted content over a P2P network and be either illegally or legally doing it (as in breaking or not breaking the law).
Also the monitoring methods are really bad. They have been known to be so wrong that a law firm contracted to fine people for breaching corporates copyrights has even fined a dead/blind/old person that didn’t know anything about p2p and didn’t download anything. Also they keep reporting things like printers and other devices that are in no way capable of piracy on a p2p network.
Disconnecting someone’s internet connection does not help the content makers in anyway. Even if piracy has a negative impact on sales (which I doubt as many company’s already put me of their products) disconnecting their internet temporarily will not do anything to help sales as they can still manually share with a mate. And their internet will be back up within a week. Their not even getting money out of it. And the only way to stop online piracy is to kick online pirates of the internet. This will not solve piracy so why do it?
This just makes things worse for everyone.
If the government disconnects my internet permanently I will fly to the parliament building and stand outside and not eat until I get my internet on and my rights back.
RIAA have been caught and charged of price fixing. RIAA have sued against damages in sales but then never given the royalties over to the artists (taking someone’s royalties is called stealing). RIAA support only a few companies which do not makeup the entire industry (however they claim to support the entire industry) and each of those companies do not work for the artists as they have shares and work for the shareholders. So to sum it up the RIAA work for a few companies (not all companies) in the music industry whose sole goal is to make money for the shareholder. Given that the RIAA have been caught price fixing, have restrictive DRM, operate in anti-competitive ways, been charged for price fixing, sues school children wrecking their lives with debt forever, and have even stolen from the artists it raises huge amounts of doubt to their so called motive “supporting artists + making the world nicer”. That coupled with the fact that they do not represent the majority of people and that in a democracy the majority decides what to do makes the law dum.
MHM yes looks like plutocracy indeed. If you look at the democracy index you see that they are targeting and spending a lot of time to try and get some of the (probably most of them) top 10 democratic countries.
I work for an NZ ISP. There is no incentive for an ISP to police this law. In little old NZ we charge per meg so ISP make a great deal of money from pirates and pirating. The worst that would happen is we would make them move onto a new account. It is not worth making all this fuss about.
If you look closely at the law there are gaps a 100 feet wide in it.
IMHO
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