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NZ MP Enjoys Copyright Infringement, Votes For 3 Strikes
An anonymous reader writes "As New Zealand politicians are looking to rush through a new copyright law, 92A, which imposes a 'three strikes' regime on people accused of file sharing, some New Zealanders were a bit amused to see Parliament Member Melissa Lee stand up to speak in favor of the bill just hours after tweeting how she was enjoying a compilation of music put together for her by a friend. Does that count as her first strike?"
yes it should.
The friend could be an amateur musician and given her a compilation of original works.
Melissa Lee is just the National Party's token Asian, and after a by election shambles has probably risen about as far in the party as she is ever going to. She is not very smart, and every time she opens her mouth in public she proves it again. She is however quite nice looking, and probably brings a bunch of Asian votes.
This was voted upon under urgency and passed 111 to 11. The only chance of it not becoming law is if the Governor-General blocks it, but I don't think that ever happens.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Owned bitch.
... after tweeting how she was enjoying a compilation of music put together for her by a friend. Does that count as her first strike?"
Doubtful given the article also includes:
"Now, to be fair, in her speech, she does say she gets that sharing a DVD or a CD can be sensible."
If one person who legally posses a CD/DVD with copyrighted material loans it to another person that is quite different than some other person who makes an entire library of music available to everyone over an internet connection. The three strikes law seems to apply to file sharing sharing only, not copyright violation in general. Its not even certain there is a copyright violation in this case.
New Zealand simply needs a national day of action, where three people place copyright infringement claims against every member of parliament who voted for the three strikes laws. Just to see what happens.
In fact it's probably worth putting in three infringement claims against everyone just to see how long it takes to shut NZ's internet down.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Indeed, big media has gotten new media wrong for decades, if not centuries. However, for the first time in history we have the technology to support new media WITHOUT big media. It doesn't take a giant publisher to create a best selling book anymore and put it on e-readers, apps, itunes, or other distribution systems. Nor does it take big developers to distribute boxes of games or other products.
What we will eventually see is the decline (but not abolishment) of big media in favor of independent distributors. The point is that they can do anything they want for copyright laws but the internet and its users are much too savvy and agile . They can't stop the momentum and they'll keep throwing money at the problem thinking it will stop the hemorrhagic. How often do we see on /. articles about how piracy is the result of poor products not poor regulations. Ah who cares...
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
I think it's the same kind of problem that prevents most people from getting up in arms about DRM. They just don't make the connection between the physical world and the digital world. For most of us on Slashdot, we see music (or text, or video, or whatever) as just another data stream. We see data as being the same stuff regardless of the delivery medium. Other people see a fundamental difference between, say, an MP3 file and a CD.
When they have a CD, they have a solid thing in front of them that they can point at and say, 'there's my music'. With music on a computer that they got over the Internet, it's a lot harder to point at a thing. It's scary, because it's one thing to talk about copying a CD and ending up with a big pile of pirated CDs, and it's quite another to talk about copying an MP3, and suddenly there's potentially an infinite number of pirate copies with no obvious physical consequences. There are physical and monetary barriers to making a bazillion copies of a CD, but no boundaries at all to copying an MP3.
Of course, to us, it doesn't make any difference. We know that the data are the same regardless of media. And it's obvious to us that people like Lee should realize that getting a pirate compilation from her friend is the same thing that a lot of us do on the Internet with music files. But it's absolutely not obvious to her (at least, I assume, from the obvious dissonance between her actions and her words).
I'm not even trying to take a position pro- or anti- in this case; I'm more interested in Lee having a consistent opinion of music sharing than in what that opinion actually is.
I have no illusion that laws are anything other than arbitrary momentum of rulers and nothing shows that quite like laws that use baseball batting rules to decide how long a person will be kept in a cage or how much property will be taken from him. Never mind rational and calculated determination of these rules, backed by social theory and universally applicable and logically consistent ethical definitions... just find a nice number the plebs can relate to and feel good about quoting when condemning someone for producing something related to an idea that someone else wrote down in a government record book.
Wouldn't the NZ equiv of the RIAA count it as at least one strike per track?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
This is exactly the sort of thing we need to put a stop to! People enjoying music! If you're playing music in your car, driving down the street and someone else hears it, that's a public performance, and that's copyright infringement! If you make a song your ring tone and you didn't pay for it in ring tone format, that's a copyright infringement! If you hum a tune, that's copyright infringement! If you think about the jingle of that sub shop while you're buying a sub there, that's copyright infringement! Every single even remotely music-related thing you do on a daily basis should either generate revenue for the music industry or be considered copyright infringement! Now we've paid for the very best politicians money can buy to make this happen, so you people should mind your own business and go back to fucking sheep. And by the way, that tune that's playing when your're fucking sheep? Copyright infringement.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Here's a YouTube mashup of the speech given in parliament by one of the committee members who considered this amendment to the bill, saying that file-sharing is illegal.
Any file-sharing, as she reads it. The mashup is of National list MP Katrina Shanks ("I think I'm fairly savvy about computers...my son's got an iPad") and Miss North Carolina ("I think American education should help the eye-rack and the Asian countries").
Laughable.
Hat Tip: Public Address: Russell Brown's Hard News
The article only shows half the story.
Ms Lee said last night the compilation was made of songs that were legally downloaded and paid for. "I'm not a pirate. I have never downloaded anything illegally in my life." Earlier she had told the House she did not even know how file-sharing through peer-to-peer systems worked.
Source
In New Zealand, format shifting is legal.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Parliament Member Melissa Lee stand up to speak in favor of the bill
with
hours after tweeting how she was enjoying a compilation of music put together for her by a friend
I get "Just doing what she is told to do without knowing or even asking why."
I.e., a good little corporate soldier.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
That's basically true. Although, things are a whole lot better for businesses if people are getting limited compilations of music, rather than going out and just pirating it off the internet. Why do I say that? It's because the transaction is very limited when someone gives you music - you're not getting the music you're after, you're getting maybe one or two songs from a musician (which potentially gives you an incentive to buy more), you're getting introduced to new music you didn't pick for yourself (which might cause you to go buy more), and the exchange is limited between a few friends which requires some time. (Copying each other's hard-drives full of music is a different issue, of course.) When you go and get it off the internet, then none of that applies because the minute you want more of that artist, you can just go and pirate the rest of their stuff. That's why I don't really look at music compilations passed between friends or handed out at weddings as being in the same league as full-scale piracy. I know people who, because of their access to piracy, think that paying for anything digital is a ridiculous waste of money. The scale of the piracy matters, just as taking a pen from someone's desk and not returning it isn't a huge deal, but we'd all agree that going to the supply closet and cleaning out entire boxes of pens is a different issue -- even though the only difference is the scale of the theft.
If the compilation of songs has three or more songs on it. It is ALL THREE STRIKES..
For her and her friend...
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Instead of war on poverty
They have a war on copyright so police can bother me.
And I ain't never did a crime I ain't have to do
Cos if the prices were fair I'd be giving it back to you.
You gotta operate the easy way,
(RIAA) - "I made a G today",
But you made it in a sleazy way -
Selling tracks to the kids, "I gotta get paid"
Well hey - It's just the way it...
-----
Increase the peace.
I absolutely agree with you. I'd expect that the RIAA does not. It's clear to me that some limited amount of music sharing is good for sales; introducing people to new music is likely to make people want more of it (if they like it). Hey, that's what the radio is for, right? But the industry has got this crazy black and white view of copyright violation. I mean, they were complaining about people ripping CDs to put them on their iPods, like they were losing sales from that activity. They're getting ready to make a big stink about this cloud service that Amazon is pitching.
I'm not one who believes that we should all just give up on charging for information. But I think we need to form a basic understanding that the rules have changed, and that we need to adapt our IP laws not just to accommodate the present, but to be flexible for the future. The industry is trying so hard to drag us back to the past, where physical media was the way to control distribution, but that time has passed. I don't know why media companies don't even seem to try to see what's going on around them.
P.S. - I used to work at a particular office job. I would go to work, and I would have a pen that I got from the supply cupboard. Sometimes, I would forget to take the pen out of my pocket before I went home. Maybe, on the way home, I would stop and buy groceries, and I would write a check using that pen. She maintained that that was stealing. My opinion was that the ink that I used to do that was more than made up for by the work email that I would respond to when I got home. We were never able to see eye-to-eye on that topic.
I regularily see peers parliament IP address leeching my torrents, along with a number of other government departments. Running a blog that logs IP addresses and has had parliamentary staff post comments, I know what offices some of these IP addresses are most likely to correspond with. Implying the MPs and or staff are or have been torrenting... at work. Oh yeah, bittorrent offers exactly zero anonymity, someone should tell them. I am slightly tempted to be forwarding the logs to the relevant copyright holders.
No special software required, your average torrent client shows you the IP addresses of peers. Encourage others to do the same!
You were not surprised, I hope...
I've noticed this logical disconnect many times before. I was talking to someone about file sharing. She was of the opinion that the artist was entitled to money for copies so file sharing should be prevented. Which is fair enough.
A couple of weeks later the same person asked me to make copies of a couple of DVDs she'd borrowed. I tried pointing out the logical disconnect here but she didn't get it and seemed to think I had a moral issues with making a copy.
This is coming from the woman that told the media that her chances of winning a by-election were slim. This was weeks out from the election. And she didn't win.
Is it any surprise that the politicians do not understand the proximate or remote the file might go?
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
@Warney lol. Does it count if the friend is the composer?
"I didn't jump to conclusions. I just took a a tiny little step, and there conclusions were."
Politicians are voting on an issue they have no understanding, judges are ruling on technology they have no grasp of. Until there is some education on technology that doesn't come from lobbyists, copyright law will never be anything more than a love letter to the industry.
The law will not stand a Constitutional test. Given that so much is now done via the Internet, and how reliant people have become on its availability to do even the simplest task such as grocery shopping, pay for bills, or even look for work this would very likely be termed a violation of human rights.
As a Kiwi this whole thing is acutely embarrassing...
As I understand it, copyright laws are only supposed to apply to the actual copying of data. Thus, if I copy a cassette tape, give it to you, and you play it, you aren't breaking the law unless you decide to copy the tape yourself.
So, if you rob a bank and give the money to your ho, she's not breaking the law when she spends it?
Who cares about piracy rate. Purchase numbers are important. If you get enough people buying then you make a profit, if you don't get enough people buying, you don't. The number of people NOT buying is always in the billions of people and their purchases add up to zero, no matter how many pirates you have.
If 90% of the public pirates, then the investment put into creating books, music, software, etc will also be forced to decline
if 99% of a million people who saw your work pirate it and only 1% buy, you are still better off than if only a thousand people saw it.
Given the original posting, there is incorrect information. The bill just passed by the NZ parliament does not institute section 92A. It replaces all the myriad paragraphs of section 92 with a myriad of paragraphs numbered 122. 92 is done away with.
So the first we hear about this bullshit is the day they are about to rush it through parliment with some other earthquake legislation... and thats half the problem, why does something so totally non-urgent as copyright infringement need to be rushed through? Well i'll tell you.. its so that no one has chance to think about it properly.
The kids i teach can't even grasp why this legislation is bad further than preventing free downloads... its when this legislation is used to disconnect people who's speach the government / big corporations / riaa doesnt want you to hear. Then they say.. ah but they couldnt use it for that purpose.. oh yeah just like anti-terrorism laws have only been used to fight terrorism!
"P.S. - I used to work at a particular office job. I would go to work, and I would have a pen that I got from the supply cupboard. Sometimes, I would forget to take the pen out of my pocket before I went home. Maybe, on the way home, I would stop and buy groceries, and I would write a check using that pen. She maintained that that was stealing. My opinion was that the ink that I used to do that was more than made up for by the work email that I would respond to when I got home. We were never able to see eye-to-eye on that topic."
actually you may have a Bible hook in your favour
I can't peg C&V but it does state somewhere "muzzle not the Ox that treadeth the corn" Im assuming that you are limiting your actions to "forgot to take pen out of pocket" and not going to "take a box home with you".
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
There are many times I choose to Vote to some thing which will punish what I am doing if it passed into a law. I don't see a problem with it. Why is it so hard for many people here to think that it is possible?
Maybe I did not get it - and it's not explicit in the linked article either.
But, assuming that her friend did not illegally got the music tracks (but e.g. owns the CDs), where is here the copyright infringement? At least in the US and most Europe countries, copying music that you "own" for a friend is OK under "fair use" or "private copy" exceptions of the copyright law.
Wow, what kind of hardware and connection do you have where it doesn't take an ENORMOUS amount of time to copy someone elses (normally 100s of gigs to multiple terrabites of "data") hard drive to yours over the net?
But sadly, what we think doesn't matter.... what the "people" who will be suing us (RIAA) think matters, IF you wish to avoid costly legal proceedings.... which is why we fight inane laws like this one
Perhaps, but according to the PenRIAA that theft of one pen is only a symbol of the thousands you have stole over your lifetime and they should be reimbursed with extra fees, interest, inflation, ect, ect..... so now that one pen just cost you $12,000.00 and 2 life time sentences in the ink mines, so that you can better appreciate what they go through to give you pens....
And perhaps the last issue is that stealing pens means that noone can use that pen.... using digital music does not remove the original, nor alter it in any way, therefore nothing is lost. No I don't think you should go and pirate all your music, but I do think the RIAA is completely wrong in how they are going about this and that the music industry needs to embrace this new tech and utilize it where they can. I do buy my ebooks and music online where I can and where it doesn't cost twice as much (or more) than the equivalent in the store (and takes a fraction to create, if any cost, since they will already have digital copies to make the physical ones from.... yes all CDs are made by computers, so all the industry has to do is shoot that digital copy to a download and ta da, they can charge for it without extra cost, ditto for books) and yes I do download ebooks that I own the physical one for, and movies that you can no longer buy (physical or digital) but that I have old copies of since I don't wish to loose my purchase due to time and the wearing down of the physical medium.
Sorry, I think you walked into a pitfall trap. Without checking NZ law, just suppose "format shifting" is legal - you can't make a format shifted mix tape AND "loan" it.
And your second point is also flawed because that was the whole point of the Jammie case, she wasn't a super-seed sharing gigs of songs, the **AA only listed some twenty four songs but racked up colossal fines per song.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Wow, so the analogy of Queen Bee is THAT accurate? (Certain bees only get one use of their stinger which then damages them afterward).
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Can we trade some of our evil US politicians for your merely dense ones?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
One strike per 20 seconds.
I don't think you can complain if you're not the copyright holder, so it wouldn't do much. OF course, I'm no expert in NZ law.
And the important part, she broke no part of this law that I can see. The law is about file sharing, not local copies. She was not file sharing. Her friend probably was, but she was not. She said she didn't know what p2p even was or how to use it.
Someone on NZ needs to alert her that most likely, her friend just got the first strike. Not 3 all at once, that's not the way it's intended to work. Maybe then she will understand. IF you focus on the hipocrisy angle, she will say she did nothing wrong and the point will be lost.
I thought that all queen bee stingers were unbarbed. The non-queen bee stinger is a modified ovipositor (which is why only females can sting), but only infertile females have barbs. The queen can sting over and over, not that it's do her much good in most cases, though.
This is all okay; this is how she was told to vote.
In fact there is evidence -
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89013/another-study-finds-file-sharers-are-big-content-spenders/
http://www.zeropaid.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/CommunicationsStrategies_2010.pdf
that file-sharers end up purchasing works by artists for various reasons including better quality, and that the impact of file-sharing is complicated and certainly not always negative.
the queen bee can sting without dying: it has no barb and occasionally one has to fight it's mother/daughter for control of the hive.
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"Wait until he starts on another kick, then reply to him as an AC. It's the new meme". - by tomhudson (43916) on Sunday May 09 2010, @08:29PM (#32150544) Homepage Journal
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"Wait until he starts on another kick, then reply to him as an AC. It's the new meme". - by tomhudson (43916) on Sunday May 09 2010, @08:29PM (#32150544) Homepage Journal
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