Slashdot Mirror
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."
There goes any hope of migrating to New Zealand once I become financially independent.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
Actually the $15,000NZ and the six month disconnection are just the maximums the Copyright Tribunal can hand down. The summary makes it seem like they are the default judgements: they aren't. Rights holders will need to prove that they were damaged severly to get awarded this. Really, the maximum penalty of $15,000NZ for effectively three infringements is tiny compared to judgements in the US against people like Jammie Thomas.
As much as I despise three strikes laws like this, at least this legislation has judicial oversight and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. As I understand, there will be a fee associated fo lodging and infringement notice, so it won't be a free for all for the MPAA or RIAA (or their NZ counterparts). However, penalties for false notices haven't been addressed yet, although organisations like the Creative Freedom Foundation are pushing to have this addressed before it becomes law.
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.
"Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceedest on to three. Five is right out." - Amen