Section 92a of the Copyright Act requires New Zealand ISPs to cut off Internet access for those accused of copyright breaches. Not those found guilty after due process of law, but after accusations by those who believe their copyright has been breached.
This iniquitous piece of legislation subverts our justice system and enables vigilante action on the part of those organisations who claim they are suffering financial losses from breaches of copyright. NZCI (a coalition of organisations calling itself New Zealand Creative Industries):
… says the issue [of online piracy], which has generated a virtually united front of opposition from ISPs, and ICT industry groups, is not about ISPs policing the internet, it’s about ISPs “responding to a high standard of evidence of infringement and illegal activity on their networks supplied by rights holders”.
[Via : Computerworld > Copyright law an 'opportunity', not a problem.]
Let’s be clear about this:
- Copyright holders believe person X has illegally downloaded copyrighted files.
- Copyright holders approach the ISP of person X.
- The ISP is required by law to cut off person X’s Internet access.
If any judgement is involved it’s on the part of the ISP who must determine whether or not to disconnect person X.
That kind of approach is vigilante action. It’s just that vigilantes traditionally act outside the law, rather than being enabled by it.
Section 92a subverts our justice system. I’m no lawyer, but as I understand it, our legal system usually runs like this:
- Person X is accused of a crime.
- Evidence is presented to a duly constituted court, following rules set out in the justice system to ensure fairness.
- If Person X is found guilty then they are punished according to the framework set out in law, with penalties decided by a judge.
I’m sure copyright holders are miffed that people appear to be violating their copyright. I’m a copyright holder and don’t like people violating my copyright.
I believe artists and authors and other creators should be fairly recompensed for their work. I am not advocating piracy.
I do believe that this piece of legislation is iniquitous. I don’t care if the organisations represented by NZCI are losing dozens of dollars or millions of dollars because of piracy. the point is that if they are suffering losses by theft then they need to take their proof to a court of law, and that court will decide on appropriate penalties for the guilty.
It is entirely inappropriate that ISPs should be required to take such drastic action as cutting off someone’s Internet access based only on accusations by aggrieved parties. This piece of law should never have been passed in the first place and should be totally repealed before it comes into effect at the end of February 2009.
Finally: a warning to all New Zealanders. If this law does come into force you’d better make darn sure that you know about every single packet passing through your Internet connection. Don’t leave your computer unattended with children or visitors in the house or business; don’t share your Internet connection with anyone; monitor your computer for viruses and malware that may be sending unknown traffic through your system.
You may be disconnected, and since no court of law was involved before this penalty was applied what hope will there be of seeking redress through law?
If you’re disconnected, who will you turn to? Where can you seek ‘your day in court’?
It’s at times like this I believe New Zealand should have a Constitution. I’d lay good odds that this piece of legislation would breach any Constitution of any democratic country.
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Great post Miraz! We’ll put it in our next newsletter.
Hi Miraz,
Nice consistent way of putting it. And nobody cares ….yet! We will see what happens in March and the ensuing legal actions.
I’m still hoping that ISPs are too greedy to kick people out of their network. Why would people need 10-40GB traffic accounts if they don’t steal stuff? There’s really not enough legal stuff to download to justify that volume. So people are going to downgrade their ISP accounts which will lead to less turnover and profit. But…
In America all TV series and stuff is available free of charge on the internet (with ads). Not so here. At least not everything. Maybe this will change that or at least the demand.
That’s the positive but I’m sure this is just going to be a big ego/greed trip for the SONY’s and RIAAs of the world.
Cheers Oliver
Oliver, you wrote “Why would people need 10-40GB traffic accounts if they don’t steal stuff?”
We have 2 adults in our house and we don’t steal stuff. We routinely use 20Gb per month, and I’d be happy to have more at my disposal.
I download numerous podcasts, often in fairly high quality video. I watch various legal videos online – perhaps iTunes movie trailers, for example.
There’s plenty of legal stuff out there that can easily blow out those bandwidth limits.
I regularly watch several legal video streams online, that chews through the bandwidth. I have about 10 years of data that I regularly backup to a remote server (I haven’t used rsync yet but I probably should to cut down on my traffic).
Gamers presumably chew through bandwidth (Eg, how World of Warcraft uses Torrents for distributing its data).
Oh… now I remember what I forgot to write in the above post.
“This excludes prosumers (cool word isn’t it?) like yourselves.”
But honestly for a normal family that does not consist of pure computer geeks 20GB data is a LOT. Legal downloads are limited to things like movie trailers and youtube (ok, I’ll admit that’s sketchy on the legal side). So why are there 40GB and 80Gb+ packages? Why is the rest of the world on flatrates?
All I’m saying is that “illegal use of the internet” is widespread and manifests itself in high volume downloads. Hence the need for high cap data plans. This need will fall should the restrictions around download be enforced. Resulting in a drop of revenue for the ISP’s. So actually your ISP’s are your friends. They want you to use bandwidth legally or illegally.
What I can foresee is that with enforcing this law all the illegal actions will vanish off into VPN/SSL/SSH’d networks and portable HDD’s at gaming evenings. In effect nothing will change just the means of transportation. The down side is that us legal users will be scrutinised as if we were criminals with no or little legal influence of how that is done and when. Bear in mind that scanning for illegal content means scanning ALL content! CONTENT!!! So all your emails are read and saved, all the websites you surf to inclusive of content, all your downloads, all your movie trailers.
Please tell me we want all this for ourselves in NZ.
And it doesn’t stop there. The main body asking for this is RIAA. That is a US company trying to enforce their might. That means all our content will end up in the hands of Americans at some point and you can’t tell me they won’t look if I’m -apart from being a notorious downloader- also a Al Qu*** supporter. …Orwellian all this is.
We’re in a world of greed and it isn’t on the side of the criminals here. I think the criminal behaviour we see here is actually a response to the out-of-touch copyright industry. We’ll see how it develops. I think the ISPs will suffer even more than the users. They will get the flak from both sides. Government and customers. And they will be more likely to oppose 92a if it turns out to go wrong.
@Matthew:
Your backup/rsync is probably illegal come March! Say you backup your applications or image data owned by a 3rd party or **-forbid your iTunes library. To your ISP it will look like illegal activity. i.e. your backup could be used for illegal activities.
“So why are there 40GB and 80Gb+ packages? Why is the rest of the world on flatrates?”
I’ve been told that it’s due to the expensive connections going out of the country (Eg, the cost of the Southern Cross Cable and others). New Zealand still has data limit packages because the bottleneck is in these cables and ISPs are, I think, charged by volume and so they pass this on to their customers. Other countries are more populous and surrounded by other large countries and so they can distribute the cost more effectively which reduces the costs so much that they can remove data caps.
In short: we’re stuck at the bottom of the south pacific and data is expensive here
@Matthew:
Yes but why on earth would you ever need so much data traffic? I think it is mainly for illegal traffic. They could just sue anybody that has a 40GB or upwards download cap. They’d probably get more positives than negtive hits. I have no proof for this but this is what I think.
As I said before I don’t condone criminal acts but I also think industry needs to get its game up so that we can do what we want to without paying and arm and a leg. With digital distribution channels there is no need for anything to be as expensive as it now is. Less cost will generate more use and still cover all expenses and profits.
Hi Oliver, I’m not much of a gamer but according to the gamers at GP Forums online games use about 200mb per hour so a house with a few gamers could chew through 20GB easily. If they watch some streaming video too they could push it up there.
Generally speaking though I think we both recognise that bandwidth is an inexact way of going about detecting copyright infringement. You wouldn’t even know which artist should get paid for any fine given to the alleged infringer.
We can do better than that — we need trials.
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