Br3nda Wallace has noticed something strange. A press release from Judith Tizard on 16 October barely registered before it vanished. I didn’t see it come through on my feed from the Beehive site, nor on the newzealand.govt.nz feed. And it seems that it hasn’t been taken down, but permissions have been changed so that it gives back a 403 – Forbidden response, to which I say WTF? Fortunately Br3nda was able to track down the Google cache (which is still kinda weird – it hung around long enough to be Googled but not to be fed out on RSS) and links to it. She’s also preserved the text in case that disappears.
The text of the piece is pretty innocuous – Tizard refers to
alarmist claims made by a small group of IT commentators in the media that recent amendments to the Copyright Act would have ISPs cutting off the accounts of their users based on unsubstantiated accusations of copyright infringement.
“This is quiet simply untrue, and I am sure they know it,” Judith Tizard said.
Yeah, right. In light of this Computerworld story from the weekend, it’s not just we alarmists who don’t know it. TelstraClear also seem to have misunderstood the Act:
TelstraClear’s head of corporate services, Mathew Bolland, says from
November 1, if TelstraClear hosts a website and someone phones up
complaining that site has breached their copyright, TelstraClear will
have to take the site down.“We don’t check or verify,” he says. “We take it down.”
Tizard goes on to say:
“We worded this section of the legislation in a way that meant ISPs could sit down with rightsholders to work out a process to identify who repeat infringers are and what were the appropriate circumstances to stop them. We have given them the tools to make this work.”
Pardon me if I can’t see the tools. The Act mentions as yet unspecified regulations but I doubt we’ll be seeing them before the election.
And Helen Clark said (on Sunrise) that Tizard had got APRA and the telcos talking, to sort out this mechanism. TelstraClear is, by any use of the term, a telco – are we to take this move of theirs to be the result of the talks? Or are they as confused by the legislation as the rest of us? It would appear to be the latter, and they’re just making sure they’re covered.
The Government started this mess, by invalidating the Select Committee process with a last minute SOP, so they should be fixing it. Instead, they’re backing away hoping that it will work itself out.
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Good grief, even the Minister doesn’t get it — TelstraClear refer quite clearly to their “hosting a website”, which means that they’re following the procedure under 92 (c) and 92 (d); viz, they get a notice in proper form, they’re therefore considered to know about the copyright infringement on the site, and are therefore liable. What choice does TelstraClear reasonably have?
Whereas Ms Tizard is referring to 92 (a), which lays out when to disconnect users for repeat infringement; quite a different thing altogether.
To be fair, that might be me conflating two separate events separated by about 10 days, and Tizard’s was first.
Yes, TelstraClear is referring to 92c&d, but their logic is pretty much what they’ll apply to a as well, I think.
And it’s the whole of the section 92 that Tizard is referring to, but focussing on a.
But you’re right – she doesn’t get it.
Coincidently (I presume) I sent Tizard an e-mail early on October 16 asking what she would do come February 1 when people start making claims that the Labour party website has broken copyright as the lack of penalties applied to people making false claims would likely result in quite a few people making such claims.
I received a reply telling me that she was considering the issues raised and that she would reply shortly.
Nothing further as yet.
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