If you don’t wipe your recorded programs immediately after watching them, you are breaching copyright.

(2) However, subsection (1) does not apply, and A does infringe copyright in the communication work recorded and in any work included in the communication work, if—

(a) A retains the recording for any longer than is reasonably necessary for viewing or listening to the recording at a more convenient time;

I reckon the police should go raid Judith Tizards DVD recorder, I bet she is infringing!

S92E particularly effectively bans use of certain types of cache software, since the cache is no longer allowed to modify the material (92E(1)(a)) – so you can’t store it compressed.

92E(2)(a) is not practicable.

92C makes places the ISP in a very difficult position. It’s not qualified to establish fact (that is the domain of the courts), so the wording in 92C(4) could be reasonably interpreted as requiring a court order for the ISP to do anything.

Why don’t the ISPs simply say “we aren’t qualified to establish fact, so the courts will have to instruct us”. I’m pretty sure the judges would actually be sympathetic.

Those complaint notices can be spoofed. I wonder if we all started spoofing some complaint notices and get some politicians cut off from the net (now that they made it safe by removing penalties for doing that) maybe then they will see how stupid it is.

The law doesn’t define what ‘reasonably implement’ or ‘appropriate circumstances’ might mean. Rightsholders may dispute these interpretations, and they currently are with the TCF. If I, as an ISP (which according to the law I might be) adopt my own policy that the rightsholders disagree with, and don’t have a consultation process like TCF, then the only way they could encourage me to change my interpretation of the law would be through civil legal action.

As it stands the large rightsholder organisations already seem to disagree with what TCF thinks is reasonable. If TCF goes ahead with the policy they have proposed (without the altered section) then they could be sued by the rightsholders for failing to implement the law. On the other hand, if they adopt the suggestions of RIANZ/APRA about disputes being resolved by the rightsholders, then they could be similarly on the receiving end of legal action for consumer groups who could very reasonably decide that the provision was not ‘reasonable’ per the law.

The ambiguity of the law is the largest issue. I personally don’t support the principle really at all, but at least if these matters had been discussed in select committee and actually codified in law there wouldn’t be the gigantic grey area that there is now.

Then there are the huge questions of scope… What constitutes an infringement? What/who is an ISP?

Not quite. The law makes no such prescription. To comply with s92A, you have to:

- have a policy. The TCF code is one such.
- reasonably implement it so that you terminate in appropriate circumstances.

Hard to see how making copyright owners provide sufficient evidence of 3+1 infringements (1 more than RIANZ etc advocate for) is unreasonable and allowing disputes inappropriate (given that the DMCA does likewise).
-

“Okay, push the Green Luddite myth yet again slijmbal. Guess some of you guys must think it’s fun, but getting a bit tedious from my end. In my experience, there are plenty of ICT geeks in the Greens.”

Being an ICT professional with a science background I can tell you from my experience that the average ICT person is no more or less scientifically aware as any other (non scientific) professional ie typically two fifths of b****ger all. There is no requirement for any scientific background to work in ICT. So that’s a major read herring.

And it’s not a myth – the Greens are, in general, Marxist luddites with crap science. Their approach actually detracts us from doing something about huge areas of the planet we gob on.

Mind you those whales are really persistent – they get on the Japanese boats despite their use of harpoons to repell them >:-)

..if national/act let this go through..

..they can never again issue/use the words ‘personal rights’..

..phil(whoar.co.nz)

Sure you don’t mind taking flak for your own decisions, but why would you use up very scarce goodwill on defending what Judith Tizard did?

Because the first instinct of any politician is to exert their control over the rest of us, regardless of what colour their banner. They think they know best, David. It’s why they put themselves forward for office in the first place.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as the Who sung. They also went on to say:
There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now the parting on the right

Unsolicited electronic messages that only advocate political lobbying are fine.

[DPF: They are legal. Politically they can backfire though]

I can phone them.

I can write to them.

I can stop them on the treet or knock on their door.

But let me send an innocent email and all hell rains on my head. thanks fuckups!

[DPF: As Toad says, you are wrong. Just don't try and sell your friends a toaster by e-mail]

I remember the RIAA put up their own music files which just contained loud audio pops which had the effect, if you played them, of potentially damaging your speakers or your ears, depending on the volume played. I could easily see them setting up bots on filesharing networks and logging ips. Remember with p2p file sharing, you’re constantly creating “new connections” so if you hit two different bots in one session (highly likely) you’d be a “repeat offender”…

And what was so special about 3:31pm Friday last week?  No it’s not that it was Friday the 13th – there are plenty of those. 

Issue the command: $ perl -e ‘print ($x = localtime(1234567890)), “n”‘  

Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 2009

(The convention used to represent the date internally in most computer systems being the number of seconds since the beginning of 1 January 1970).

It’s was a once in a lifetime event – pity most of us missed it!

The law simply says ‘repeat offender’ with no clear indication of what would constitute repeat, so basically anymore than 1 accusation should be enough to do it. Also no time period specified in the law, so two strikes in three years would probably be enough for the law.

TCF’s draft code specifies three undisputed claims in three separate months.

The wording in law, regarding repeat, is also interesting I think… “In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.”

By a strict interpretation that seems to suggest it one would only be a repeat offender if they were to infringe the same work on more than one occasion. Of course there’s also no clear definition about what constitutes an infringement in online sharing, so perhaps each connection to a peer would be one infringement.

The biggest problem at all with the code of practice is that it’s a fairly lenient implementation of the law, allow for three offenses, stipulating they must be in separate months, allowing for disputes, making exceptions for those reliant on the internet… None of those things are required in the law, and rightsholders could very well take legal action against ISPs for not properly (as they see it) enforcing the law.

Also, the code as it stands really makes it impossible for small rightsholders (individuals, indie bands, etc) to enforce the law themselves, as it has requirements about being pre-approved, per-ISP which has a cost associated.

And there are many technical issues which are not addressed in law. Situations where the ‘ISP’ (poorly defined in the law) might be unable to tell who the infringing user was.

Overall it’s really poorly thought out, and pretty much impossible to enforce due to the vagueness of it.

92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers
(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.

(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.

It may be draconian, but I’m not seeing an innocent until proven guilty section, perhaps someone (DPF?) can direct me to the section which does that?

[DPF: Go to the TCF website and go to the alternate model proposed by rights holder where they advocate they should get to determine guilt. They have sued an ISP in Australia for refusing to terminate on their allegations]

Personally, I’m considering writing my own complaint bot. There is a lot of fun to be had there.