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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."
I don't understand the need for DMCA-like legislation when there are hard encryptions available to negate the question. DMCA is like claiming you're cracking a bank safe when all you did is slide a latch or ignore the "No Trespassing" sign.
Aren't DMCA legislations just a means of guaranteeing that companies keep using insecure technologies?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Here lately we're starting to hear the beginnings of experiments into actually USING P2P techniques to distribute content and experiments in dropping DRM, and yet the DMCA is continuing its march across the WTO.
I wonder how long it will be before the media people realize that it will always be a minority of people who will actually bother to copy and crack and skip commercials and never buy. This leaves the majority going along in their mainstream way taking things as they are packaged and delivered.
I'm hopeful that the experiments in dropping DRM will be as successful as the software industry was when it gave up on their copy protection schemes that involved odd and flawed formats on floppies and CDs. (Is anyone here old enough to remember the floppies with the errors in specific locations and all that?) Now they haven't given up entirely, but they have definitely become more friendly about it as they matured. I'm hopeful that the content people mature more in their new digital frontiers and realize it's all pretty much the same thing as before and that people will continue buying regardless of other options being present.
Or writing a letter, or suchlike. But even if the law gets passed, it wont make any difference to me, will still keep playing DVDs in Xine, will still tell others how to play DVDs on Linux, and I doubt any enforcement will happen. But I thought the government was smarter than this, I guess not. If anything, the opposite should he happening, the government should really be actively seeking to eliminate DRM.
That's right. Introduce an important bill just as the country is closing down for the rituals surrounding the Christmas holiday and set the date for submissions just a few days after most people surface after the haze has cleared.
If this is what is called Consultative Democracy, then frankly I've just become rather envious of the Fijians. Now we know why the leadership of the NZ Government was saying such condemnatory things about the actions of Cdr. Bainimarama.
We are very isolated from the Real World(tm) here in Little Ol' NZ, so don't get to hear very much about what's happening out there. Do the governments of other countries which purport to be ruled "by the people for the people" get up to these tricks?
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
Non-Kiwis of the world unite!
You're no exception in NZ at all.
It's certainly like you describe here in the UK as well, and I hear it's the same in US.
What seems to have happened is that politicians worldwide have now lost any intention of representing the interest of "The People" honestly, and always work against them in any way they can. The political system is only as good as its practitioners, and hence nowadays it's rotten to the core.
I don't know if it was ever any better than this. Back in the days of the Founding Fathers in the US it must have been better, you can see the pro-The People intention clearly expressed in their Constitution. But of course that's being subverted now by the current administration.
Just treat politicians with utter contempt for the pure scum they are, universally. I don't know of any that are an exception to this, in the current day and age.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The best thing for everyone at this point would be for the investors in the entertainment industry to invest in oil futures and leave entertainment to Youtube. People get their free entertainment and the investors can still make money since oil stocks are likely to climb for the forseeable future. Okay the entertainment will mostly be Weird Al wantabes and uncle Simon getting hit in the nuts by a baseball but hey it'll be free and everyone will be happy.
Recently apple opened up their iTunes store in NZ. On that very day the NZ govt passed a law making it legal for people to copy their music from one format to another. Before that it was illegal in NZ to rip your CDs to MP3 or any other format.
Here is the odd thing. If it's now your right to be able to format shift the music you bought wouldn't any technology that prevents you from doing that be illegal?
evil is as evil does
It gets attention because it's a western country with an above average interest in technology. I lived for seven months in New Zealand and six months in France, I'm a Yank myself. I found New Zealand on pare with France and England and the US as far as access and interest in technology. A lot of those 121 countries lack the access to technology that New Zealand, Europe and the US have. Not surprising there's a lot of references to New Zealand. I'm sure english speaking doesn't hurt as well. Even in Europe english speakers aren't as common as you'd think. When I was in Spain I found when they realized It didn't speak Spainish well they'd try French or Italian but few spoke english. English may be considered the current world language but a large number of people still speak little or no english. People forget but at one time French was considered the world language. One day I'm sure it'll be something else. When Slashdot is mostly Chinese they'll still be wondering why there are so many New Zealand references.
From my blog:
m entID=28024
A 1-42C2-AE75-9200DD87F738/48250/DBHOH_BILL_7735_401 93.pdf
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?Docu
and the actual proposed legislation is here:
http://www.parliament.nz/NR/rdonlyres/5A88D15B-C4
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
The police for example. If you call 111 (our emergency number) when, for example, somebody has broken into your house, you'll be told that there aren't any officers available, but somebody will be there to see you as soon as possible. Nevermind the fact that your life may be in danger.
The proper response in this situation is say "fine then, I'll shoot him myself" and then hang up.
You'll have cops swarming all over the place quick smart.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/06/05 4240&from=rss Australia's own DMCA.1 13_text.html People suing and winning against a publisher in another country, over what was said about him, as it was viewed in Australia it was valid.u ts-linking-on-notice/2006/12/19/1166290520771.html and today we get no linking to copyright material.
http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v11n3/beyer
and how about http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/copyright-ruling-p
Don't get me wrong, Australia is doing very well, but it is backward compared to new New Zealand when it come to the internet.
Please don't mod this trolling right winger up.
The NZ Police Force are actually very good. Like any organisation of size they do have the occasional hiccup, but 99.9% of the time they do an outstanding job, often above and beyond thier call of duty. I would gladly take the NZ Police Force over any other country's in a heart beat, and more often than not that's about how long it takes for the NZ Police to attend a call out.
The same goes for our other emergency, search and rescue, and indeed general health services.
As for the DMCA-like bill, as has already been mentioned, this is only going to select committee, our elected representatives felt that it is important enough to warrant some investigation, debate and public comment before they make up thier minds.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
4. and what we are doing IS illegal.
Speak for yourself. I like to legitimatly reverse engineer all kinds of stuff for hobby as for a living. The DMCA is the biggest source of stress in my life and i have 2 teen-age daughters.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
The New Zealand government has bugger all interest in property rights. As far as I can tell, the current morality is something along these lines. If you steal a car, then you are a criminal and the car is not your property or the property of any you sell it to. If the government steals a car, then it is their car and they can damn well do what they want with it.
The government does not give a damn about property rights. They are just doing a deal with someone in return for something else. In this case, I would imagine they have been offered a slice of someones pie and/or are being pressured by Maori to protect their culture. I can't see there being a huge problem with p2p uploading in a country with a largely 128kbs upload rate.
Personally, I wish they would shaft the music industry in New Zealand and the rest of the world. I like a good sing-along, and think the music should be made because we want to, not for money.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
The more I think about it, I'm coming around to the idea that the DMCA (and its ilk) might not be the end of the world.
Think about it... What would your reaction be if you were in business and your chief competitor cut their own legs off at the knee caps? Would you view it as a bad thing?
Now recast that as RIAA and friends vs. Creative Commons and friends. Surely the DMCA will only serve to drive people towards the Commons?
So in the absence of the abolition of copyright, perhaps copyright+DMCA is a better position for the producers of Free content than copyright-DMCA? Think of the DMCA as the equivalent of the GPL's "liberty or death" clause, applied to the RIAA's content. The DMCA ensures that non-free content will die, leaving Free content to take its place.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Don't forget this bill also legitimises the age old practice of placing your cd's onto your mp3 player, which is currently illegal here.
... which is a good thing. On the other hand, it looks to me as though it could perhaps make it a criminal offence to own a region-free DVD player. Maybe not (I'm not enough of a lawyer to be able to read beyond the introduction to the bill), but region-coding doesn't seem morally different from "technological preventions measures" to me.
I think thats why a lot of the cheaper DVD players came with a 'secret' pin code to unlock the region free. These players were imported into NZ defaulted as zone four to keep everything legal.
We're here with you.
Current legislation is due to pass in NY concerning the downsizing of hospitals. We have a small, financially efficient, hospital in our little village that is due to be downsized... unless our legislators vote against the bill.
No vote means passing by default.
And it's over the Christmas holidays.
I suppose we'll all be driving 30 to 40 miles for the nearest hospital, or paying an extra $2k for an ambulance roll out.
Yay Democracy?
#SickNotWeak
It's easy enough to claim "most countries that have a DMCA" when there are very few examples, and only one original.
It's as specious as the US DEA argument that there is no valid research in the United States demonstrating medical use of cannabis, while other US departments prevent any such research from being done. Catch-22. It's Schedule I because there is no documented medical use; there is no documented medical use because it's illegal to research.
Technically the viewpoint and phrasing is correct: there is no such research in the US. But there is in the rest of the world.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
is Playstation 2 Memory cards. 8 Mb of flash ram for $25 bucks. Why? Because of what Sony affectionately terms "Magic Gate", a really basic system of controls for what can and cannot be copied from a memory card. Thanks to this stuff triggering the DMCA, we get no 3rd party Memory cards (except the Nyco ones, that are also $25 dollars). This kind of stuff is what the DMCA is all about. It's about giving companies absolute legal control over their products. Hell, Lexmark tried to use it to keep 3rd party printer cartridges off the market, and I'm still convinced the only reason they didn't succeed is the judge didn't want to have to pay more than he already was for the damn things.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So I have just read the whole thing. Takes a while. Anyway this is a long way from DMCA. Fair use is fully protected and now we have fair use (we didn't in NZ untill now). For NZ its a big step forward IMO.
Now when I say fair use I mean you are alowed to use cracks etc if the DRM is preventing fair use. You are can also distrubute these cracks providing you have ensured that its only going to be used for fair use provisions. Its by far the best "DMCA" i have seen. You are even able to decompile code to create interoperable products and the EULA cannot deny that right.
But its not perfect. I would like to see DRM vendors forced to respect fair use. And format shifting is for 2 years unless extended. There is also no expcit right to produce backups.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The DMCA is the biggest source of stress in my life and i have 2 teen-age daughters.
Something tells me you know waaaaaay too little about what your daughters are doing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Maybe it's because he knows (from his logs) his teenage daughters are spending hours downloading music, and he's worried that with the crackdowns etc they'll stop and start doing other things instead ;).
So, how does if effect my bittorrent downloads?
That's what I was told when I worked in retail. The Teac and LG sales reps told me that it is illegal to import or sell DVD players that are not zone 4 in NZ, but it is not illegal to sell them with instructions on how to change the zone. Hence, every Teac DVD component comes with instructions, and from memory, it's "Eject tray, Setup, Volume Up, Volume Down, Volume Up, Volume Down, Mute". For most LGs it is eject the tray and press 1 six times on the remote.
Most Teacs had a little blue or green piece of paper with the instructions on it, but the LGs I had to tell the customers when they bought them.
... but of course the Australians are still quite happy to claim our television programs, music, art and scientific achievements as their own.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
I find that astonishing, given that it's hard to find a DVD player in a shop that doesn't have "multi-region" or "region-free" written on the box! Well, if you hang out in shops like the Warehouse or DSE, that is.
gadgetophile.com
There is an online petition against the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill. This should probably have been part of the original post. If you live in New Zealand or are a New Zealand citizen or permanent resident, please do consider signing the petition. Thank you.
That apparent paradox is the key to the media companies' strategy.
It used to be media companies were content to simply abide by copyright law. If someone broke copyright law, the companies would go after them. But aside from that, we customers could do what we wanted with their products.
Then technology made it increasingly easy for people to break copyright law, and harder for media companies to find out who broke it and stop them. So they started implementing technology of their own: copy protection.
Naturally, this was poorly implemented and caused more trouble for real customers than for pirates. But the media companies realized it was very useful, because it allowed them to separate what people were legally entitled to do from from what the companies let them do. So media companies grew to rely less on copyright law -- which provides a relatively small set of prohibitions -- and more on physically preventing customers from doing anything the media companies didn't like.
Because the technology was still pretty crappy, people could crack it. So the media companies lobbied governments to make cracking these technologies illegal. And here's the really sneaky part: they didn't just get protection for technologies that prevented copyright infringement. They got protection for pretty much anything they can dream up. All they need to do is bundle it all together and claim it's meant to help protect copyright.
The end result: media companies can effectively write their own copyright laws! They decide what they want to allow us to do and what they want to prohibit, they implement a technological measure to this effect, and it's illegal for anyone to circumvent it. They've ended up with the best of both worlds: the ability to dictate terms to customers how they use their media, and the legal right to enforce compliance.
I should buy some cement.
Which may be fine in yor country but in the UK you can be jailed (and people have been) for using undue force in their own homes for attacking burglers.
I'm not suggesting you actually shoot someone. I'm pointing out - tongue in cheek - that if you say something like that, the place will be swarming with cops in minutes.
Probably you are a troll, but I will bite.
1. copyright DOES exist
It was 14 years long for books originally. You should probably look at the motivation for the original laws and compare it against publishing monopoly abuse that existed prior to that.
Are books now so advanced that a 95+ year monopoly is needed to encourage people to write them?
There is no real justification for a monopoly that last a century and/or beyond a persons life-span.
2. it exists for good reason (we couldn't have the GPL without it)
The GPL, Open Source and Creative Commons are reactions to the effective termination of the Public Domain. Specifically, GPL is a reaction to copyright law that does not fit software. Software is obsolete in 10 years, and in 95 years, when public domain, the software is only available in binary form.
3. creators have the right to control the distribution of their works
It's not the "creators" that are worrisome, it is publishing collector companies that expect to buy and "own" information, even of the dead, and profit from it forever.
Creators should expect a system that compensates people for new invention.
There is no eternal publishing right. It was intended to be a temporary monopoly that encouraged people to innovate.
Panasonic come only in Zone 4 in NZ, and the only way to re-region them is through a special infra-red remote. Sony do it a similar way. On their boxes they boast "multi-format" playback, but never multi-region. Even on Teac and LG, the cheaper ones, they still only state "multi-format", which most people interpret as multi-zone.
So before you go calling me a "trolling right winger", please check that you're not speaking entirely on opinion or hearsay. The problems facing the New Zealand Police are well documented in the media here.
You sir, deserved to modded better than that. Our government has to change... the police force is one symptom of our sick leadership, and this new bill being debated is just more one of many, many other examples.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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."
Should read:
New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to piss into the wind, before the committee rubber stamps the bill and collects their brand new sailboats from NZRIAA/NZMPAA.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Personally, I like my robbers like I like my coffee -- covered in bees.
1. That the NZ Government is basically the most corrupt that the country has ever had, including under Muldoon (for examples, look up the recent media stories on the PM forging works of art for sale, the PM dodging speeding convictions for a high-speed motorcade to a sports match that would have landed anyone else in Jail, the ruling parties blatant breach of election spending laws, and in the Auditor-Generals clear report the blatant misuse of public funds for political purposes, and using its control of law enforcement to dodge prosecution)- actually the Fijian solution looks kinda acceptable at this point
2. That the PM is arts-mad (banned the commercial parallel importation of legit DVDs when lobbied by the industry, lets people on welfare dodge work if they are engaged in artistic or creative endeavour), spends a bunch on arts, and will make a speech at the opening of a door if the arts are involved.
3. That the ruling party is flat-broke and desperate for cash, whereas the other main party is recieving a lot of donations - hence frantic government efforts to legislate for state funding of political parties and clamping down on private donations which they don't get many of now (see corruption above). Thus they are probably going to be very receptive to lots of little men in black suits from Sony et al with suitcases full of cash for bribes ^H^H^H^H errrr contributions.
When you add all these things up, there is probably zero chance of them standing up for the freedoms of citizens. Still, we should all put in submissions nevertheless, even if they are in vain at least they cant say that there were no objections.
Oh, and just as a tip, submissions can be emailed and letters to Members of Parliament don't require stamps - a little quirk of the NZ postal regs.
Listen up America! This is what you get when you aren't politically active enough in letting your representative know what you want.
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