Interesting aspects to the blackout
Whale Oil notes that thousands of users have blacked out their facebook and twitter pages in protest against S92A.
What surpises me is two of the blackouts on Twitter – TVNZ News and TV3 News.
British humourist, broadcaster, author and technofreak Stephen Fry has added his support to online campaigns against New Zealand’s new copyright legislation, which would require ISPs to disconnect customers accused of downloading copyright material.
Go Stephen Fry.
Russell Brown also makes many great points today:
It is not only that this law denies the accused any due process, it is that it stipulates a penalty that no court would impose in adjudicating a copyright complaint even if infringement were proven. Remarkably, someone convicted in a court of law of handling child pornography via the internet would not suffer such a penalty.
It is quite proper to seek efficient ways of adjudicating legal disputes, but the problem with Section 92(A) is that it places the adjudication of a legal dispute either in the hands of parties who are not competent to make such decisions (ISPs and telecommunications companies), or (in the approach endorsed by RIANZ’ Campbell Smith) in the hands of one party to the dispute. To say this isn’t ideal is putting it mildly.
I actually think a dispute resolution service is the kry to solving this argument. The system used for .nz domain name disputes (which is basically an intellectural property dispute resolution process) could be used as a basis for a online copyrightdispute resolution service.
Germany and the EU have both rejected the idea as a breach of civil rights, with the German Secretary of Justice observing in a statement that:
I don’t think that (Three Strikes) is a fitting model for Germany or even Europe. Preventing someone from accessing the Internet seems like a completely unreasonable punishment to me. It would be highly problematic due to both constitutional and political aspects.
The UK has rejected it also.
One argument in favour of 92(A) is that the doom is exaggerated, and that rights holders will be visible and responsible, and would not make frivolous complaints. One would hope this would be the case, because a penalty for frivolous accusations was removed from the amendment bill.
Yes they removed the penalty for false complaints.