NZ Illegal Downloading Crackdown Law In Effect

First time accepted submitter sfranklin writes "As of Sept 1 at midnight, 'anyone caught downloading copyrighted content illegally could face fines of up to $15,000 and have their internet cut off' in New Zealand. You don't even have to do the deed yourself. The 'account holder needs to know what's going on even if they themselves don't do anything online ...' Scary stuff, although I wonder how much actual enforcement is likely to happen."

Comments

Not all bad

[atomicbutterfly]

If I were a Kiwi (slang for New Zealander in case you didn't know), this law would give me an additional impetus to begin searching for free/open-source/creative commons software and media for all my computing and entertainment needs. Sure, I'd buy stuff occasionally as well, but if I had to buy every single thing I was using which was pirated I'd be broke and seriously in debt. Much better to hunt out legally free software and media.

Having said that, I'm an Aussie (the bigger brother of the Kiwis) and it's a hobby for me to do this anyway even though we don't have such a draconian law. I suppose some others in NZ might find ways to get around it, but I don't see the point of risking it myself.

Re:Not all bad

[nospam007]

I'd invest a couple of bucks a month to rent a seedbox in Burkina Faso or Tonga.

Re:Not all bad

[dbIII]

The NSW police in Australia are being taken to court this month for pirating a few thousand copies of some terminal emulation software that really should have been replaced a decade and a half ago and is licenced at an insane price per seat for what is effectively abandonware. So there you go, even the police force does it.

Re:Not all bad

[TapeCutter]

Said so from the land of 3 strikes-your-out.. seriously besides France, I thought Australia was the worst place to be if you're a pirate

Don't believe anything AFACT tells you. There are no baseball inspired laws in Oz against downloading, rumours of such were just another AFACT wet dream. The MO of these parasites is simple and obvious, make exaggerated claims in country A about what is done to "battle piracy" in country B, if country A is dumb/corrupt enough to actually implement it in law, reverse A with B and repeat.

Also it is not a crime to download copyrighted material in Oz since everything on the internet is copyright by default, sure AFACT can try and sue you in civil court for damages but it's never been done because the only damage they can claim is the real cost of the material, as such most cases would not even make the $50 minimum damages bar to get the case heard in the small claims court. If AFACT conducted themselves like their brethren do in the US (pay $X,000 or we will sue), I'm pretty sure they would be investigated by the authorities for racketeering and/or extortion (admittedly I may be giving them too much credit).

Re:Not all bad

[Grishnakh]

I thought America was all free-market and capitalism? It sounds more like communism with your lack of choice.

You're kidding, right? You must be new here or something. This subject comes up pretty regularly on Slashdot, with lots of other Americans saying the exact same things as me. I'm a little surprised given your relatively low UID.

No, America is NOT free-market and capitalism. We love oligopolies and monopolies here. In fact, we think that any government action to limit monopolies is bad, because it's "punishing success", and that monopolies should be allowed to do anything they want to their customers or potential competitors. We even think that corporations are people; there's a good chance our next President will be a man who said those very words. Don't forget, we also believe in allowing unlimited abuse of the patent system, so that big corporations can use vague patents on obvious "inventions" to shut out competition from smaller rivals.

However, we don't believe in communism. Communism (in practice) is where the government controls everything, and owns all the corporations. What we believe in here in America is an elite group of people running the corporations, and the government only serving to protect their interests. That's frequently called "fascism".

Simple

[Sasayaki]

It'll be enforced almost never, except against people who earn a personal grudge from someone in authority. Turn down that creepy ex-politician for a date? Get a knock on the door from the state sponsored copyright cops. Film a cop beating up a homeless guy and post the video on YouTube? Your NAS gets seized by her majesty's finest.

It's like criminalizing swearing. Since everyone except extreme outliers is guilty of the crime at some point or another, it's not possible to enforce it properly so the law becomes just something else to throw at people who piss off people with power.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't work like that at all.

The copyright owners must contact the ISP with proof of an offence (an IP address from a torrent would be enough), then the ISP passes on the warning.
If you get three notices, then you have to go to court and defend yourself by proving that you didn't download the material.

That is a terrible link in the summary, more detail about the law can be found here.

As a kiwi. .

[Master Moose]

I don't think that anyone actually wants us to use the internet.

We have always been penalised because of and by it. Expensive and slow by international standards. . . and now this finally passes (it has been on the books for some time)

I would write more, but I am likely to go over my data cap any minute.

Re:As a kiwi. .

[miasmic]

Yeah I'm already over my data cap, I've been waiting a week before I can start watching Youtube videos and download again, only a couple more days to go.

It really is appalling and a backwards attitude is seen from both Telecom providers and the government here. It results in usage of search engines, smart phone apps etc that's years behind countries like the US and UK, even taking into account population differences. I'm totally disappointed to hear that this passed. The country I feel in many areas takes too much notice of what is going on in the US in legislation and corporate policy and not enough of what is going on in Norway, Sweden and Findland, for example, which have more in common with NZ in many significant ways than the US does.

From a previous /. article about undersea cables, NZ is currently poorly serviced, but a more direct, much larger link is going in directly towards the US in a couple of years (as I remember from the map) which should hopefully improve things, with NZ having better connectivity than Australia in that direction rather than the other way round. But it's still little excuse for the current setup of things.

As culture dies in New Zealand

[kawabago]

This should snuff out the last vestiges of culture in New Zealand. The RIAA's own recent study found downloaders are their best customers. If this law is effective in stopping downloaders, the New Zealand music industry should collapse completely. That will be funny!

Re:As culture dies in New Zealand

[miasmic]

NZ is the only English speaking country I've been to where the music scene isn't dominated by US or UK bands/artists. Local bands regularly make up a fair portion of the charts.

NZ's trademark sound is a Maori influenced 'pacific' flavour of reggae/dub (check out Fat Freddy's Drop), but drum & bass (and d&b influenced stuff like dubstep) is also much more popular in the mainstream than elsewhere. There's also quite a few decent homegrown alternative/rock groups, some of which have achieved international success. I have listed some of the most popular NZ originated bands/artists in the last 10 years.

Roots/Dub/Reggae

Fat Freddy's Drop
Katchafire
Salmonella Dub
The Black Seeds
Trinity Roots
International Observer

Rock/Punk/Metal etc

Stereogram
The Mint Chicks
Evermore
Minuit
The Datsuns
Head Like a Hole
Fur Patrol
8 Foot Sativa
Dawn of Azazel

Drum & Bass

Concord Dawn
The Upbeats
Shapeshifter

Chronicles of Ridiculous

[digitaltraveller]

1. All Content is Copyright by default.
2. How do you distinguish the legal from the illegal content?

Re:Chronicles of Ridiculous

[blahplusplus]

Copyright is the new enclosure of the commons. The digital commons is being enclosed by corporate/government powers because it is a threat to the status quo.

Some links to the actual bill

[matrixskp]

http://www.copyright.com.au/Latest_News/New_Zealand_passes_Copyright_Amendment_Bill.aspx http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2011/0011/latest/viewpdf.aspx New Zealanders protested quite loudly against this bill - with the internet blackout campaign - http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html - , unfortunately it was still passed. More proof that politicians are mostly a bunch of money grubbing ass bandits that will do what ever big business wants them to for a little time at the swill trough!

My connection has improve dramatically

[bunbuntheminilop]

I haven't been able to hit 5Mbps for 3-4 years (it's not much, but I'm in rural New Zealand), and I've never been able to stream video in high quality, but tonight I'm totally able to. My ping is only 25ms, and I never thought it would be possible to have a ping so low. Now I can play games online!

I was against it, but, maybe it's not such a bad thing? What do you guys think?

Re:Here's a thought

[EnergyScholar]

Hey, have other slashdotters noticed the increasing number of astroturf posters in the past year or two? I presume everyone reading this knows that one can hire consulting firms that maintain stables of fake online identities to 'contribute' to the 'discussion' on all sorts of threaded discussions. I think five years ago they were few enough to barely notice. In the past year I've spotted several probable astroturf trolls attempting to sway discussions. The **IA agents are especially obvious.

stupid attorny generals

[cheekyboy]

Why do people in real high power approve such shit laws?

Sure if we all received a nice 350k salary we would never ever pirate anything.

And stop using the term pirate, we arent raping people on boats.

Its civil copywrite violations.

Oh and btw every cop in NZ uses bit torrent to download movies for their kids, they sure dont get paid enough to buy games/movies.

I wanna see politians on 55k salary.

Some good links

[Mistakill]

here is some good reading by a leading NZ IP lawyer, on the new law...

http://lawgeeknz.posterous.com/copyright-cheapskates
 
  and http://lawgeeknz.posterous.com/nzs-copyright-proposal-guilty-until-you-prove

Its only for torrents!!

[nzac]

The law only applies for using p2p at the the application layer. I would think about 3 out of our 120 politicians have a basic understanding of torrents/internet.

There are so may obvious ways around this but they either cost or are less convenient. http://bayfiles.com/ is just in time.

It also makes it so you are very unlikely (a little less than before) to be prosecuted under our general copy-write law. I would say the stupidity of discrimination against protocols makes will make piracy easier.

Re:Illegal law in most countries

[YttriumOxide]

While nice in theory, it has a downside... I'm originally from NZ but haven't lived there in a long time. When I did though, I was once talking to a guy on IRC who was pretty seriously talking about doing some rather nasty things involving explosives and a jet liner... While I couldn't be certain if he was serious or not, I decided to do the right thing and let the police know about it.

What happened for doing my civic duty? Well, the police turn up at my house with a search warrant citing "attempted murder and breach of the telecommunications act" (interesting combo, but yes, that's what it said) and took all my computers away to "investigate". Several months later, I finally got them back, with the HDD wiped on a couple and the power switch physically broken on one.

I made a complaint to the police complaints authority, but was essentially ignored the whole time.

Only minor plus was I got in the Southland Times (newspaper) and it raised a fair bit of attention with the general public (enough that people recognised me on the street for a few months)

Back on the topic at hand: If you did do something like you suggest, I'd expect similar treatment would ensue...