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New Zealand Reintroduces 3 Strikes Law
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."
Well, the point of such a thing would be that it is not possible to ban/detect without also banning any and all VPN, HTTPS, TLS and other "legit" Internet traffic. A properly designed successor to BitTorrent, Gnutella, Usenet, Freenet and Tor would by definition require banning of the whole Internet to stop it.
Not that the villains known as politicians and "lawmakers" won't eventually try that too, this whole actual (as opposed to being-paid-pompous-lip-service-to-but-in-practice-next-to-impossible) "freedom of information" basic-element-of-democracy thing has been a thorn in their sides from the get go. They and similarly interested big-media and big "entertainment" mega-corps would like their control of the narrative back, thank you very much, even if it somehow involves our dead bodies as one of the steps to get there. And the sooner we get to the ammo-boxes stage of the "boxes-of-change" sequence the more likely things will be decided one way or the other for better or worse, this of course amongst many other pending outrages and societal devolutions that have been galloping ahead of late heading in the same general direction of utter tyrannical dystopia or general bloodshed.
I read the article and all it specifies is for "copying material". Does that mean uploading, or also downloading, or what? What if it is for downloading?
We have become so accustomed to think copyrighted material = songs or movies. How many times do we stop to think that web page we're looking at, with 20 different .gifs or .jpegs might be a violation? Are those lolcat pictures properly licensed? If I email a few, will I be in violation of the distribution part?
And what about text?
This is what is so insane of copyright, and specifically of criminalizing it. Because it makes 99.999% of the populace guilty, and then it's purely up to the state to use it on a person when they feel like it. 3 strikes and you're out of you mind if you think this is a fair deal. Fuck you, 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.
Honestly, this legislation is but a foot in the door. MPAA and RIAA rather not waste their own resources with civil trials, they'd rather waste the taxpayer's resources to prosecute people and put the fear in them, the populace's own money used against them. What a load.