New Zealand DMCA Moves Forward

nzgeek writes "The DMCA-like amendments to the New Zealand Copyright Act passed their first hurdle in parliament today, with an overwhelming 113 to 6 vote to pass the Bill to the Commerce Select Committee for further discussion. The detail-oriented can read the full debate (or rather lack of debate), and one enterprising New Zealand legal blogger has an excellent series of posts on the Bill, its background, and its implications. New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to make submissions to the Select Committee, before the committee makes its recommendations and sends the Bill back for a second reading."

Comments

Only the first reading

[JamesNK]

Although the bill passed with an overwhelming margin, that doesn't mean a lot of the MPs will support it next time it comes up for vote. In New Zealand MPs often support a bill in its first reading because they feel it requires more thought and debate.

For example recently a bill to raise the New Zealand drinking age to 20 was passed in its first reading by a large margin before being voted down in the second - MPs back off from drinking age hike

There is some good as well as bad

[kiwi_mcd]

From my blog:

My notes I posted to mailing list reproduced on this:

Here is the major announcement from the government:
http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?Docum entID=28024

and the actual proposed legislation is here:
http://www.parliament.nz/NR/rdonlyres/5A88D15B-C4A 1-42C2-AE75-9200DD87F738/48250/DBHOH_BILL_7735_401 93.pdf

Some quick highlights as I read the act: (Note I am not a lawyer)
- Reverse engineering IS allowed under some circumstances - basically for interoperability
- format shifting is allowed but only initially for 2 years, this can be extended though (or not)
- time shifting is allowed provided you don't keep it and it's not available on demand
- ISPs are basically not liable (provided they follow take down notices)
- allowed to alter commercial software if the vendor doesn't fix problems in reasonable time
- anti-TPM (DRM via another name) is prohibited for sale or for producing (seems to cover open source). Fines of $150K or 5 years jail. Doesn't seem to prohibit if you have a copy but you can't write it yourself, sell it or tell others about it. Does make it an offence if you use it to copy copyrighted material. But you are allowed to use anti-TPM for "interoperability of software" so conceivably you could use software to play Itunes or DVDs on Linux. But this only applies if
you have asked vendor for a copy you can use and they don't supply in a reasonable time.

Overall this seems to be much better than DMCA of the USA but not perfect. It is probably better than people could have hoped for.

Ian