New Zealand Reintroduces 3 Strikes Law 165
An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand government has reintroduced a newly rewritten addition to the Copyright Act which will allow rights' holders to send copyright notices to ISPs, and force them to pass them on to account holders. Section 92A of the Copyright Act will allow rights holders to take people who have been identified as infringers more than three times in front of a Copyright Tribunal. This law will allow the Copyright Tribunal to hand down either a $15,000 fine or six months internet disconnection. The law specifies that the account holder himself is responsible for what is downloaded via the account, and doesn't make allowances for identifying the actual copyright infringer if there are multiple computers tied to an account."
Better than the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
On the face of it, this at least looks better than the UK law. Over here they want to make it three accusations and you're out. At least the New Zealand law is back up by due process and has to be done by a tribunal.
On the down side, I guess it is tied to the account owner rather than the person who did it, which could lead to parents taking the punishment because of their kids.
Any rights holder? (Score:1, Interesting)
Will this allow any rights holder to give ISP notice or only large corporations?
I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Since they don't care about _who_ actually downloaded the content only who owns the account and pays the bill for the ISP, could you not use this law against innocent people or as a weapon of choice against your enemies by tapping their wireless networks to download your torrents and media?
I propose that everyone in NZ goes out and cracks every wireless network they can and do just that, show them the backwards thinking of not caring about going after the actual infringing party but the account owner.
Re:Time a truly anonymous network for P2P (Score:3, Interesting)
This is merely a presentation/technical problem. One can design a system whereby even though data is travelling through and being stored by nodes, at no point in time that data by itself can be used to reconstruct "child porn", "intellectual property", "bomb plans" (or in fact anything meaningful at all). One has to specifically instruct one's node to obtain the complete set from other nodes to be able to even tell what the contents is (outside of completely independent process of labelling, search and indexing).
In this way no one can whine that his/her computer is "being used to store child porn without permission" and so the excuse is gone. This in fact is one of critical flaws in Freenet's design that such a claim cannot be made - the node stores encrypted chunks of whatever files are there and theoretically it is possible to reconstruct sufficiently meaningful parts of movies or images from them on their own without other nodes being needed, Freenet's design was not intended to guarantee that no reconstruction of any kind is possible of the contents not specifically requested by the node's operator.
But this is solvable in a number of ways and it is only a matter of time when a system with this and many other needed features will appear. More draconian the political Witch Hunts, faster it will happen.
Re:$15,000NZ is just the maximum (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for helping spread the word NimbleSquirrel :) (I'm from the CFF) See my other post in this thread for a bullet point of the issues that surround the new proposal.
Re:Aw, piss. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd rather live in a free and open society, not one where the next step is to consider libraries copyright thieves for providing a copymachine near the books.
Libraries feel the same way, and they're way ahead of you. :) www.accesscopyright.ca
The concern becomes what movement pushes bulk copyright licensing into unmanageable territory. Many content owners don't care for it, the same way they don't care for libraries. (Despite the fact they are extremely likely to have made use of libraries in their formative years, that enabled them to become professional content owners. Capitalism has no taste for irony.)
Re:Better than the UK (Score:3, Interesting)
It's about copyright infringement on an internet connection, so to answer your question: both. The process is based on taking someone to tribunal for what their internet connection was used for. It's a basic court-like system, where if you're accused of infringement you defend yourself with whatever evidence you have that what you did was acceptable or that. In that respect it's like most trial systems that have a presumption of innocence but an obligation to defend yourself. As for your specific example of the difficulty of telling whether the content you're getting is legal I agree that's a problem. I don't really see a way around that though. Proprietary licenses are notoriously difficult to understand in comparison to Creative Common's use of icons. The only thing I can say is that this new proposal is a judgment interpreted by people who you can reason with and explain that it wasn't intentional. Just so you know, the ISPs aren't inspecting traffic.