13 reasons why the Infringing File Sharing Act is bad for you by Christopher Wood
See Christopher's original Facebook note here.
Many of you have been asking what the big deal is about the new copyright legislation (Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill 119-2). Isn't it a good measure for stopping illegal downloads? The answer is quite clear: No.
First, in case you missed the news: http://www.3news.co.nz/Govts-Skynet-legislation-becomes-law/tabid/412/articleID/206882/Default.aspx
There are so many problems with this law. I've listed thirteen here. There are others more fundamental especially relating to what the law should be expected to achieve, the polarised debate over the intention of copyrights and what should be protected under them, which is a natural consequence of the birth of the information society, but that's a big subject with a lot of history (that I hope to write about some other time).
Some reasons are legal, some ethical, and some technical but nonetheless crucial:
1. Presumed guilty on accusation
Despite the revision committee trying to fudge the issue, this law does work via the presumption of guilt. If the accused party has had their 3 warnings and goes to the Copyright Tribunal, they have to give reasons why the warnings were invalid. But if the accused party is innocent, what reasons can they have, apart from "I didn't do it"?
Presumption of guilt is rife for abuse, as has happened overseas under similar laws. In the digital realm evidence is often very temporary, complex, and easily fabricated, so providing evidence of your innocence could be very difficult, depending on how much is required. Providing evidence of your guilt is almost as difficult, but why should that mean an advantage should be given to accusers? New Zealand intellectual property lawyer Rick Shera says the law is grossly unfair, out of place and unnecessary in this analysis: http://lawgeeknz.posterous.com/nzs-copyright-proposal-guilty-until-you-prove
When a new law contradicts the Bill of Rights it better have an extremely good reason... and protecting the entertainment industry isn't one.
How to prove you're not in league with scurvy ne-er-do-wells like this?
2. Unsupported accusations
New Zealand Judge David Harvey has noted that 30 per cent of copyright litigation fails due to a failure to prove ownership of copyright, or due to the copyright in question not being governed by New Zealand law. Yet this law encourages more copyright infringement accusations, and puts the onus on the accused to prove themselves. There is no penalty for making spurious accusations.
3. Stifled creativity and innovation
People are often accused of infringing copyrights unreasonably, for instance quoting a section of a work to comment on it, or for sampling or making a parody of a copyrighted work. This is why US law has the concept of "fair use" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fair_use) - in NZ it is called "fair dealing". The Creative Freedom Foundation, a charity representing thousands of Kiwi artists, has written a short explanation of copyright and how the new law will stifle creativity: http://creativefreedom.org.nz/copyright.html
Some copyright owners frequently make claims of infringement even when the use is fair because users are likely to forgo their use of the work rather than spend money defending themselves - see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation.
Even without accusations, creativity is stifled by laws like this. YouTube continually removes videos that have no right being removed, simply at the request of a copyright owner.
4. Disproportionate penalties
Firstly, if found guilty you could potentially be fined $15,000 for downloading a single song - there's no clarity in the law about what a appropriate fine would be. The purported cost of copyright infringement is very arbitrary: Overseas, people have been ordered to pay millions of dollars for downloading a small number of songs, for instance this mother of four charged US$1.9m for downloading 24 songs: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas
5. Insufficient warning
The minimum time between the first accusation being made your last strike is 20 working days. It could be easy to miss both warnings, there's nothing in the law about making sure you actually receive the notices. You could even go on holiday for a month, come back and find you have to go to the Copyright Tribunal for alleged file-sharing from a week before you left.
6. The law is ill-defined
I've already mentioned how the law doesn't define the level of proof required to rebut the presumption of guilt, nor how to determine fines.
The technical definitions are particularly useless. For instance, it defines file-sharing as where:
(a) material is uploaded via, or downloaded from, the Internet using an application or network that enables the simultaneous sharing of material between multiple users; and
(b) uploading and downloading may, but need not, occur at the same time
Downloading from a network using a network? That's meaningless. Besides that, it is very loose, any internet activity could conceivably be covered by this. That's clearly not the intent. This kind of thing is very difficult to define - still, it needs to be better than this. There are other things such as the change from using the term ISP (Internet Service Provider) to IPAP (Internet Protocol Address Provider), a change which will become meaningless in the next few years as IPv6 makes everyone potentially an IPAP. So not only is it loosely defined, it's already outdated (this last would most likely would have been fixed if the law had gone through the proper process).
7. ISP costs
Compliance with this law is going to cost ISPs. Although accusers are required to pay ISPs a fee, there is no consideration for the capital expenditure required to setup the system. And they only have four months to get it up and running. This could be very significant for smaller ISPs.
So you can expect your internet connection to be more expensive than it would otherwise be.
8. Violated human rights
More importantly, your internet could be terminated. This law was passed just two days after Tim Berners-Lee (credited with the invention of the Internet) declared "access to the web is now a human right" (https://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/041211-mit-berners-lee.html). The UN has proposed that internet access should be a human right, and it already is in France, Finland, Estonia and Greece.
Terminating internet in response to infringing copyright is worse than the post office stopping deliveries to your house because you sent photocopies to someone. The earlier law was revised due to protests over internet termination. The new bill disables that penalty for the moment, however it can be re-enabled with an order-in-council, not needing any public consultation or parliamentary vote.
Which leads on to the problems relating to how this law came to be:
9. Political precedence of law ambush
Urgency is supposed to be for urgent issues. National has passed 17 laws under urgency in the last two years, most of them completely unjustified (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10719268). The passing of this law without proper process sets a particularly bad precedent.
This law has made headlines throughout the tech world, along with comments on the sucker-punch nature of its passing, and how equivalent laws overseas have been pushing through in a similar way (eg. UK's Digital Economy Act 2010):
Groups like Creative Freedom NZ, which helped lead protests against the initial bill, were taken by surprise. "The item has been due to go through the house for a while now, but has been fairly low on the list," said the group. "We are surprised to find out that it is being rushed through under urgency, and we're not alone; MPs who have been involved in the process are surprised as well."
Using the Canterbury earthquake as an excuse to push through a law in response to the entertainment oligopoly complaining about supposed lost profits, is shameful.
10. Lawmakers who don't understand the law, let alone basic technical facts
Next, it was blatantly obvious that most of the voting MPs didn't understand what they were talking about. In what the National Business Review called "a debate that often sunk to almost surreal levels of technical ignorance", MPs made fools of themselves saying things like:
"It is really important to remember that file sharing is an illegal activity."
Katrina Shanks took the prize for worst speech. Jonathan Young made a joke:
"Do you remember the movie "The Terminator"? I'm sure that you do. And the computer system... yes... the computer system called Skynet that ruled the world. It's like the Internet today."
Oh the perfect irony of analogizing the internet-enabled masses as evil robot overlords, and the government and corporates trying to control the internet as underdog freedom-fighters...
Topping the irony charts was Melissa Lee. Her speech (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IIyk1y9o_8) actually had an interesting point about how the multi-billion dollar Korean movie industry was made possible through blatant copyright infringement by the Chinese. Yet she then went on to talk about the damage done by lesser forms of piracy like file-sharing and how infringing copyrights is always an intentional illegal act. The kicker is, just hours before making her speech, she tweeted about a music compilation a friend copied for her! (https://twitter.com/melissaleemp/status/57764856488669184) When confronted about it, she replied that the songs were legally downloaded and paid for - proving that either she's a hypocrite, or worse, she doesn't know what the current copyright law is, despite voting on the law, and holding herself up as an example of an unintentional pirate.
Then there are the technical issues with copyright enforcement:
11. Trojaned machines
There are millions of computers infected with viruses which hackers use to do whatever they want - for instance, sending spam, hacking more computers, or sharing copyrighted files via file-sharing networks. (Yet another reason to make sure you install your updates and don't visit dodgy websites or install untrusted applications - not that this is proof against hackers, it just makes exploits less likely.) You should not be held liable for what a hacker does with your computer without your permission. But how can you prove you were hacked? Viruses can remove themselves after acting. And if being hacked is a reasonable defence, pirates can use it as a defence too, just by claiming it or perhaps purposefully allowing themselves to be hacked. (Now there's an interesting new reason for hackers to make viruses: a viral file-sharing network, where some people would be users without their permission - thus giving plausible deniability to all users.)
12. Shared connections
How can copyright holders identify people who infringe? One way is through file-sharing programs where users have accounts. It may be possible to track these to a person in New Zealand. But most piracy isn't done through any account except an internet account. Most internet connections are shared between many people. So how would copyright holders know which person to accuse? They can't. Your ISP can only trace web traffic to your router (often only with a lot of work) - they can't see where traffic goes after that. So the copyright holder can only accuse the account holder. So if your flatmate infringes, you might be the one having to prove your innocence. Likewise companies have to take responsibility for all their employees - an excellent encouragement for companies to enact draconian firewalls against their employees. When an employee is accused, it may take a great deal of effort to track down which employee it was - if it is even possible. Similarly with any company providing a connection, like hotels, caf?s and airlines.
Expect company-provided internet access to be more restrictive and better monitored.
13. Real pirates don't get caught
The most problematic pirates - the ones who upload unreleased movies or sell pirated copies - are very unlikely to be caught. They use anonymizing techniques and encryption to make their downloading untraceable. The same goes for hackers or anyone with the technical know-how. Or anyone connecting via an internet hotspot or public wi-fi. Or those who just download without using peer-to-peer software. So those caught are much more likely to be accidental and small-scale infringers, not those the law is primarily intended to stop.
The Copyright Tribunal will have only 5 people, so it can hardly handle a large number of cases. A small number of unlucky people will be made an example of, which will dissuade the most casual pirates - i.e. the kind of people whose piracy probably earns creative industries more in advertising than they lose in profits (but that last part is an argument I don't have space to explain here).
That's 13 reasons why this new law is bad and why law-abiding citizens will be worse off under it.
You, accused of infringing copyrights under the new law
What you can do
There's a list of ways you can protest the law at: https://www.facebook.com/notes/opposing-the-copyright-infringing-file-sharing-amendment-bill/information-on-what-you-can-do-to-help/141454075923884
from Marko Simich http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000641193889, used without permission
I'm tempted to change my name on Facebook to "John Connor"... but I've settled for merely changing my profile pics...
Other sources
- http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/0119/latest/versions.aspx
- http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/internet-file-sharing-bill-under-urgency-ck-90750
- http://creativefreedom.org.nz/2011/04/copyright-bill-has-second-reading-in-parliament
- http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2011/04/an_own_goal-2.html
- http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/the-file-sharing-bill/
- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access
- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention
- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/IPv6
- http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/isp-says-new-copyright-law-effectively-useless-aw-90936
- http://torrentfreak.com/kiwi-mp-called-out-as-pirate-after-passing-anti-piracy-law-110415/
- http://www.youtube.com/copyright_school (Happy Tree Friends, yay!)
P.S.
OK that's ridiculous, I really need to setup a blog... Facebook notes are painful...
P.P.S.
I couldn't resist using the word "sucker-punch" :P https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150146767961160&set=a.446831791159.246947.545581159
Published 21 April.
EDIT 25 April 23:00: Added several sentences to #6, including note about ISP vs. IPAP.
UPDATE 3 May 19:14: The Ministry of Economic Development has released a document seeking input on improving some parts of the act, and revealing even they are confused about what constitutes "file-sharing": https://www.facebook.com/notes/christopher-wood/ministry-of-economic-development-is-confused-about-the-new-law-help-them-out/10150176923503926
Other related posts:
Google Docs a phishing site
This is how ridiculous the whole Intellectual Property Rights situation is
What SOPA means for business and innovation
Comment by Lee Majors, on 3-May-2011 22:29
Oh man. Thank you. Great article, but very depressing to have what I already knew spelt out in such clarity. Such a stupid law, and a law that protects mainly US companies with out-dated business models.
Where is the law to protect the US buggy whip makers against the auto industry?
With every innovation that has been made to make media cheaper and more accessible the recording and movie industries have seen it as a way for them to make more profit, not provide a cheaper product. I just don't feel that sorry for them, esp. when they spend more and more money on movies and manufactured "artists" and make more and more money. All this with all these dirty eye-patch wearing pirates ruling the seas of the Internet.
Without piracy we would all be paying $36 for a digital album.
Comment by bob, on 3-May-2011 23:13
"More importantly, your internet could be
terminated. "
Should read
"More importantly, your Internet access could be terminated."
I point this out because seeing people refer to the 'internet' in a manner which implies that each person has an 'internet' is reminiscent of the sort of thing technically clueless people say. Also you do it more than once. Whilst I'm sure you don't think that each person has 'internet' of their own that could be terminated, your use of wording which implies that in an article that is pointing out technical problems with this new law is somewhat jarring.
Comment by gracefool, on 4-May-2011 09:56
All the overseas peeps from BoingBoing are going to be wondering about the significance of the whale :p
BTW it looks a lot nicer on my (public) Facebook but at least anyone on the web can see it now :)
Comment by Elpie, on 4-May-2011 11:48
Further to 12. Shared Connections, Ars Technica discusses a recent legal decision in Illinois that highlights the disconnect between IP subscriber and copyright infringer. While US case law doesn't set precedents in NZ, its nevertheless evidence that the premise behind identifying infringers is flawed.
You can read the article & decision here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/after-botched-child-porn-raid-judge-sees-the-light-on-ip-addresses.ars
Comment by Juergen Brendel, on 4-May-2011 13:01
Good article, and I agree with almost all of your points.
But just for the sake of accuracy: Jammie Thomas was sentenced to those high penalties not because she downloaded the songs, but she shared them. In many file sharing apps, upload and download is enabled at the same time, so I guess she was caught out by that. While we can see that the penalties are ridiculous, it must be mentioned that technically it was not for downloading.
Comment by Cymro, on 4-May-2011 22:16
5. Insufficient warning
Sorry but I think this section is wrong.
There is a 28 day "On notice period" for the Education notice, no further strikes against the copyright holder named in this notice can be counted until the 28 day period is up (but they can be recorded for use later at tribunal).
There is then a second 28 day "On notice period" after your second strike, where again no further strikes against the named copyright holder can be counted (but they can be recorded for use later at tribunal).
I make that 56 days for a worst case scenario.
Comment by Josh, on 4-May-2011 22:51
Tim Berners-Lee is credited with the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) not the internet. Thanks for putting this list together.
Comment by jimmyjazz, on 5-May-2011 11:02
Hmm, all very interesting but totally useless. The horse has bolted, the law has been passed as we knew it would once tuanz and the rest took over negotiations; individuals rights have been traded off for advantages to bigger players.
Arguing about why this is bad for us is a waste of time and energy. Without a lot more effort from ordinary humans this wrong won't be righted and I don't have much hope of that. Governments have learned since the previous mob tried to introduce Australian pharmaceutical industry regulations to NZ and failed because we all got so antsy about the parliamentary process being subverted or rather over ridden by 'commercially confidential' (that is how it is sold anyhow) clauses in sadly misnamed 'free trade' deals, that we the people - the ones all the pols & technocrats are meant to be working for, shouldn't be told that a new restriction on our freedom has to be passed because they have signed up to it when they negotiated away yet another tranche of kiwi's rights in a free trade treaty.
Make no mistake about that. This law had to be passed - well the politicians saw it that way anyhow, because they had already agreed to its passage long before they bothered to tell us. Who can remember the parallel importing bill or whatever the Bolger govt called the only decent bit of legislation they passed in 3 terms of government?
It suspended the rights of corporations to set up shells in NZ and award them the sole agency for importing and selling goods; their license to price fix. Under that act anyone could buy a container load of a product anywhere ie the cheapest price where ever and bring em to NZ and sell them.
Even now if you do a Google of parallel importing you will find US dept of trade and state dept press releases from the time the NZ govt passed that act condemning this freedom as an intolerable restriction on the rights of corporations.
Apparently neo-liberal trade ideology isn't quite that liberal. Every since the death of the Marxist idea that the value of an article is determined by the cost of its inputs (materials, transportation, labour etc), prices have been determined by 'demand' a fine notion, I suppose, were it not for the reality that transnational capitalists have been rigging markets forever.
Take windows operating systems for example. The cheapest place to buy an English language version used to be Malta (this back when parallel importing applied to everything in NZ) Malta was inexpensive because M$ wanted market penetration there where peeps weren't doing so well. Many kiwis sourced windoze 95 & 98 from Malta all legit but M$ went ape.
NZ used to be about the middle, but when parallel importing got kyboshed by the Labour Government under what was meant to be a 12 month trial the cost of all M$ products began its upward ascension and now I can't find anyone who pays more for an english language version of windoze than we do.
Europeans pay a fat wedge too, in fact gamers know only too well how important it is to set yerself up with a US proxy if you want to buy a game on Steam where US gamers pay half what european and Australasian gamers are asked to shell out for exactly the same article.
Anyway my point was that during the half a55ed wrestle over parallel importing it surfaced that NZ had been told to stop parallel importing of music, movies and software by Bill Clinton himself who had promised a free trade deal with the US if we did. NZ signed up, parallel importing of those items was banned and we still can't get our beef into US markets. Ho Hum what else is new?
Well during the next round of AIPAC we signed up to the same deal that both England and France did in a similar EU-US trade deal, (except France seems to have backed out) that is we would turn off access to down-loaders. So here we all are, no one is going to change this because the fools on the hill don't see that they will never get what they want from US deals but are too unimaginative to devise an alternative to trade with a decaying and corrupt empire.
Mostly tho it is because insufficient kiwis will rouse themselves to do anything - it's too hard, or that empire stuff is so old fashioned, or any of the other excuses for inaction until we reach the point where action can no longer work, then we'll say that.
So the issue now becomes how do we get around this unwarranted restriction on our freedom?
I deeply resent some sleek fool in Wellington determining what I can and cannot do in my home with my computer on my grossly overpriced internet connection, so for the last few months I have been grabbing everything from a pay file server via secure socket layer encryption ($NZD13 per month) via a proxy server ($NZD21 per month), cause I figure that they won't wait until September before they begin chasing us.
This run up period will be used as an information gathering period to find out whose up who and whose paying the rent so the sheet sniffers and associated lowlifes can 'hit the ground running' come September.
Old timers may remember back in 1968 when LSD which had been a legal high enjoyed by a few cognoscenti was made illegal. That had a similar lead-in period ostensibly to allow people to 'get legit' but which was used by the sheet sniffers of those days to work out what was goin on while it was still legal to purchase and use acid and people's defenses were down.
First day of the 'new' LSD law a big mob of citizens got arrested and made criminals. Good one Keith Holyoake! There is another parallel with that law to which I will come to in a minute.
Anyway I'm using a proxy, and SSL and haven't used torrents for years, most peeps would say that should be enough, but I'm not so sure. Surely the govt didn't go to all this trouble just to catch torrenters. I mean no one uses torrents any more - do they? They never worked too well in NZ anyhow.
Upload speeds being what they are you could never keep a good enough ratio to stay a member of any worthwhile torrent club.
You gotta figure they are going to go after all the file servers whose IP addresses are already well known to ISPs. How else do the ISP's traffic shape or manage, even when they say they don't, if they don't know the IP addresses of the file servers?
The other point of entry for attacks on downloaders will have to be the CRCs or hashes of files. Already the MPAA and their ilk send out automated take-down notices to file servers based upon the MD5 hash of archives they know to contain movies, so I assume the same will happen here. They set bots to sniff across all the file server IP addresses and routers here will be set to packet sniff for the same hashes.
Of course it doesn't take much to alter a file sufficiently to change its hash but that takes time and resources which brings me to my next point.
When the silly billies of the day outlawed acid NZ had a non-existent drug problem. A few peeps interested in mind expansion used to cop a bit of owlsey thru the post and give it to their mates, but within 2 years of acid being made illegal the streets were awash with traffic lights, Californian sunshine and all the other crappy commercial acid products. School kids dropping trips and falling off cliffs in the bush etc.
The small scale swapping of a few trips turned into a huge trade amounting to 70,000 trips a week by 1971. Then as now NZ was going thru a tough time financially so good keen men got into the game as it was one of the few ways one could get ahead. Then the gangsters took over and the rest is history.
The silly law had created a market, just as this silly law will.
Now I'm a bit old school don't believe w...z should be sold, if you pay for it it ain't warez n all that. On the other hand if the only way one can still get the latest games and movies in NZ is by waiting until the agencies with the 'rights' to those goods get around to selling them here (always waiting until they can jack up the price reduce competition and all the other nasty kiwi 'entrepreneur' rorts from the peps who bought us finance companies), is by spending dollars and most importantly knowing where to spend them, then there will be some who will choose to set themselves up as warez dealers. Sure the publishers will be happy that a price has been ascribed to that non-existent entity called intellectual property but they will be most unhappy that they have competition so they will push for yet more enforcement leaving only the committed and the criminal in the scene.
Like the movie says "there will be blood" and once that happens and joe citizen has been convinced that 'gangs control warez' then we will have a whole new class of criminal in NZ not to mention a whole new class of social problem.
As I see it there are only two ways to avert this looming disaster. The first is to raise a fuss and repeal the law but that isn't going to happen - well not in the short term.
The second is to make sure that everyone learns ways of working around this law that are simple and don't cost much. If the second happens the market for these files will remain to flooded for it to be worth the while of professional crims and the problem will be too unmanageable to be dealt with by a few ethically challenged sheet sniffers.
This won't be a check on those last hangers on who frequent TPB, it will be far more intrusive and ever changing. IF proxies work, it won't be for long. At the very least we will have to change proxies regularly that will be expensive as all get up because so called free proxies are a dubious prospect at the best of times and ones that allow anonymous connections via https are like rocking-horse sh1t.
Similarly if SSL does hold off the sticky-beaks that will only last as long as the enforcers get given a key to the back door that SSL has designed into it. But if many many people take just some of these basic protections and remember to update as sniffing ploys change the sticky beaks won't manage. Oh - they'll be keen but I suspect the pols will baulk once the cost of enforcement goes into tens of millions.
The publishers who pushed this idea have no intention of paying for it. The ban on parallel importation of software has moved the cost of enforcing counterfeit software (which was only a tiny % anyhow most stuff was legit but not 'official')onto customs aka the long suffering kiwi taxpayer very few of whom are publishing corporations. The same will happen here if they are only picking off a few particularly powerless citizens to make an example of them.
Comment by Adrian, on 5-May-2011 12:38
Not sure if you've seen this already but the MED is taking submissions on this.
Comment by gracefool, on 5-May-2011 13:12
Thanks bob and Josh for your corrections, I've fixed them in my Facebook post.
Especially thanks Cymro, yes it's 56 days, I misread the law. I've removed that and changed #5 to be about the probable pointlessness of challenging an infringement notice.
Adrian yes I added a comment on that to my Facebook post.
Juha I don't know if you ever edit old posts, but if so it would be good to update it with my latest version...
Comment by Thaler, on 17-May-2011 18:58
It has come to my attention through three good friends that own different ISP's throughout New Zealand that as of the 1st of September they will be installing blocking software to kill any file sharing, downloading, torrent or any other known software that could/will be used to download illegal material. The reason for this is that they were instructed 12 months ago to do so as there was to be a law passed that would mean they would need to work with rights holders to send out notices to their customers. The cost of having the system and staff for this massive undertaking is astronomical. Hence the installation of the blocking software along with the new web filter (you know the one that caused all the fuss but was installed anyway and paid for by the US government that allows them to block whatever they want, and monitor in real time all of our browsing, phone calls and text messages). It also includes a facility to block VPN networks.
I have a live demonstration of the new software yesterday from my home through my isp, it wouldn't allow me to go to the pirate bay, or rapid share. And when I booted up my torrent client my internet connection was killed instantly, which required a phone call to re provision my connection.
So what can be done about it? Well not much at present, I am working on a solution to go around the NZ internet but that will take sometime and some collaboration. As yet there is nothing to stop FTP, but there are plans in the works. My issue with this, is that I don't need my thinking done for me, and additionally the fact that this has been known about for well over 12 months now is very frightening.
Added to this, my friends have mentioned that have been visited by US agents (there is no better word for it-people) to ensure they comply with the active monitoring system. Quite frankly they are shit scared to not step out of line, and they have been threatened with loss of license should they not comply with the directives given to them.
I think the only thing we can do really is to write letters to our isp's stating we will take our business elsewhere should they activate such programs....
Add a comment
Please note: comments that are inappropriate or promotional in nature will be deleted.
E-mail addresses are not displayed, but you must enter a valid e-mail address to confirm your comments.
Comment by Dabombber, on 3-May-2011 22:23
The penalties are pretty unreasonable, a fair punishment for downloading a song might be being required to buy the album. That would encourage purchasing music, support the artist, and be a realistic deterrent (nobody is going to believe that downloading one song will cost you millions of dollars).
Then there's equating piracy to theft, which is completely wrong. What if someone already owns the content but didn't have access to it, or wasn't able to purchase it? As an example, I was considering buying an ebook (I already own a physical copy), but there was nowhere to buy it from NZ without DRM. I currently have a copy of the ebook but I didn't buy it, does that make me a pirate or a thief? And I'm sure if I was taken to court for it, I'd have had a better chance of defending myself if I had stolen a copy from a bookstore.