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New Zealand's Recording Industry CEO Tries to Defend New Draconian Law
An anonymous reader writes "Campbell Smith, CEO of the RIAA equivalent in New Zealand, has written an opinion piece for one of New Zealand's largest daily papers, in which he tries to justify the new 'presumed guilty' copyright law. This law allows recording industry members to watch file-sharing activity and notify ISPs of users who are downloading material. The copyright holder can then demand that an ISP disconnect that user — without the user ever having a chance to demonstrate their evidence."
I presume politicians are corrupt until proven honest.
I, OTOH, am able to do simple math. Multiply the $0.99 price that's typically charged per on-line song by the 15 tracks one finds in a typical CD and you get the same $15 one pays for the CD. Add the hassle of burning and dealing with DRM.
If people don't want to buy CDs at $15, then why do they think people would be willing to pay the equivalent of $15 for a CD online?
Charge reasonable prices and the world will beat a path to your door.
The copyright lords don't need to get a court involved to impose sanction. Their firm allegation is all that is needed under this system. The commoner is punished, and then must go to a court to prove that the nobility were mistaken.
People who like quick solutions and big government involvement don't like the rule of law and due process because they get in the way of accomplishing the "greater good." Ironically, the greater good is generally a myth, and if you look behind one group asking another to sacrifice its rights for the "greater good," you'll usually just find some selfish, self-centered individual who profits.
The data-transfer capabilities of the Internet weaken the foundation of the artificial scarcity upon which we have built our cartel. Without the ability to forcefully stop people from sharing their resources directly with one another, we will not be able to stand as a distributive barrier between those who have talent and those who want to enjoy that talent, which in turn means we will no longer be able to create and artificially inflate revenue streams from other people's creative efforts.
In order to ensure our continued relevance in the face of technological advances which displace us, and to ensure our continued ability to extract large sums of money without contributing anything of value (or even doing anything hard), we need laws that prevent people from capitalizing on their own resources.
Any technology which threatens our gravy train must be made illegal, and those who use it must be punished.
"without the user ever having a chance to demonstrate their evidence" - Shouldn't the first step be the music industry showing THEIR evidence? Only once they've shown significant evidence should the user have to step up and provide their own counter evidence or attack the industry's evidence.
What do you mean "caught"? It no longer matters whether they're actually guilty.
And the language in the article the implies that is...?
Mmm hmm. "users should be able to flag to an independent adjudicator anything they regard as mistaken evidence"
Of course, I'm making the mistake of Reading The Fine Article, and trying to make evidence-based comments, rather than commenting on what I imagine the law will be like. I'm clearly The Man's bitch.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The guy makes it sound all common sense. [Artist] checks out (say) The Pirate Bay and sees their latest hit available. They run a client, jot down IP addresses, and report to the appropriate ISPs. Bad pirates get disconnected for stealing the work of [Artist]. Who could complain?
The trouble is - we know that's not how it'll work. It won't be [Artist] feverishly protecting their livelihood. It'll be [script], executed by an "IP protection" service acting as an agent for an Industry representative, running a drag-net search and spamming cease-and-desist letters. The ISP will be running [script2] to parse those emails and notify / disconnect users. The dragnet script will make mistakes. Often. Only the end users will be paying for those mistakes by trying to re-establish their (increasingly important) connection after being victim of said script.
How do we know this? We can study from history.
This is not the driving force for extremist copyright in Canada. The Conservatives, our current governing party, is not friendly to the arts, but they are happy to go along with American demands. Many Canadian industry and arts organizations (and many, many Canadians) are opposed to the changes, but it is largely American officials and organizations representing American interests who pay the lobbyists and get the face time with our politicians.
Now in Quebec it is true that culture is of central political importance. The large arts organizations there are in favor of extreme copyright laws. Quebec's approach to copyright is much closer to the moral imperative of authorial control in France, les droits d'auteur, than to the pragmatism of Anglo-American copyright. And I believe there is a tradition in Quebec (as in France) of seeing large organizations as important forces for the preservation of society. Those traditions are likely to support copyright extremism regardless of what tools are at their disposal - though preservation of French culture is always one of those.
I shouldn't open up a can of worms, but don't mock what you call "cultural protectionism". The United States followed a similar course in its early days (hence American spelling and the lack of respect for foreign copyrights). Though it has largely failed in Canada, and though it is used to justify ridiculous proposals (e.g. Canadian content quotas for web sites), the concern that originally drove it are legitimate. Canadian culture *has*, to a large extent, failed to thrive in the face of American imports. Americans own our movie distribution network, sell TV series cheaper than we can produce them but won't themselves buy material set in Canada, and so on. Americans tend to see this in terms of free markets for a cultural product. Many countries and peoples see culture as a matter of national identity. Canadians have long supported a greater role for government in the production of culture and information. The lack of confidence you describe does exist among some in Canada, but before you jump on "small countries" as being special in this regard, take a look at the culture wars in the United states (over prayer in schools, flag burning, prudishness about depictions of sex but not violence, and so on).
Also, the "small country" stereotype doesn't work. Before you slot France in with Canada, keep in mind that it has a larger population than the U.K. (I believe surveys have found Brits suffer from lower national confindence). The U.S. has five times the population of the U.K. Canada has a tenth the population of the U.S., and about ten times the population of N.Z. English speaking countries have fewer barriers to influence by American culture, and Canada is right next door.
The copyright war is not driven by small countries or cultural inferiority complexes. It is conducted mainly by the United States (with collaboration with allies, including Canada) at the behest of a handful of huge transnational companies like Disney, General Electric, Viacom, Fox, Time-Warner, Sony, Microsoft, a few others. Almost no countries are sufficiently powerful or independent to put up effective resistance.
The dragnet script will make mistakes. Often. Only the end users will be paying for those mistakes by trying to re-establish their (increasingly important) connection after being victim of said script.
Not to mention that there is no provision in the proposed law that would define, much less punish, abuse of this regime. The word "impunity" comes to mind.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
No, it showed that somebody using that IP address had downloaded a movie. It doesn't prove who it was. It COULD be you, or your spouse, or a child in your household. Or it could well be your neighbour or someone parked outside your house - they're not proving that the bill payer downloaded the file or even willingly provided a service to do so.
I live in NZ and have done a bit of research on this. You have to register your organisation before you can start making allegations. (ie. only the big boys will be able to play that game).
We also know these bots are not perfect and can lead to false-positives.
Further the cost of false positives is not their problem. So whats the incentive to reduce false positives?
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Without copyright, every artist would simply resort to live performances, and we'd have a situation where hearing our favorite music was a matter of being in the right place at the right time and paying a hefty cover charge, *every time*.
I don't believe that for a second. And deep down, neither do you I suspect.
The problem isn't copyright.
Other than a few Cathedral/Bazaar types, few people advocate for the total abolishment of copyright. We don't mind paying a reasonable price for good recordings. We wouldn't even mind paying per-Listening if any suitable billing system could be contrived.
Music did not spontaneously arise upon the invention of copyright. People did, and still would, gladly pay the artists either directly OR for recordings. But we need not return to pre-copyright era to achieve a balance.
This is my only point. The sooner the artists "grow up" and take control of a modern private electronic distribution chain, the better for all concerned.
As for the "few" that get exploited, I think you would be surprised at the candid opinions of virtually every major recording artist on this issue. Yet, to date, they have had no real choice but to sign, sign, sign.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
A glance at a world map should enlighten you. Japan is 750 miles from the coast of China, and 1,200 miles from Hong Kong. Laying an undersea cable from Japan to an IX in China or Hong Kong is a big operation, but one that is feasible for a fairly small consortium of backbone providers to undertake. Once on dry land, it is comparatively cheap to lay more cable to increase capacity between Asia and Europe, and there's a lot of cable between Europe and North America. Going direct to North America, it's 3,800 miles to Honolulu, and another 2,400 miles to San Francisco. Those are longer and more expensive to lay, and would require a large consortium of providers to manage.
From Australasia, you're going either north to China (4,700 miles) or north-east to California (9,500 miles). Either journey needs a large consortium. To make that consortium's life grand, the incumbent undersea cable operators have a tendency to slash prices on their cables before the new cables have even been laid, thus typically sinking the new venture before it gets out of the dock.
There's a new thick pipe being laid down from Guam at present, around 6,000 miles of cable being laid by two ships (4,200 miles in one, the rest in the other). That cable has already been paid for, more or less, so in the next year or two things may get a bit better. Google Pipe Networks for more info.