InternetNZ brands proposed NZ copyright law as "too costly"

Stuart Corner
Monday, 10 August 2009 10:39

IT Industry - Strategy

"The Government's proposal would see the creation of an expensive and bureaucratic system involving the Copyright Tribunal that would add costs for government, ISPs and rights holders," said InternetNZ deputy executive director, Jordan Carter. "A notice system should instead be implemented and its results assessed. We anticipate that it will be cost-effective and obviate the need for costly and complex procedures that will not deliver corresponding benefits."

He added: "InternetNZ reiterates in its submission its absolute opposition to termination being a remedy for copyright infringement by New Zealanders. Termination is an inappropriate and disproportionate remedy that will not work. Whatever approach the government takes to replacing section 92A, termination must be off the table."

InternetNZ is instead proposing that ISPs be required to send a series of notices and to maintain anonymised records enabling them to identify frequent infringers. "If rights holders became convinced of significant infringement by the customer or customers of a particular ISP, they could apply to the Courts for the release to them of the customer details of the most frequent infringers of their rights." Having got this information it would then be up to the rights holders to pursue the subscriber for alleged breach of copyright under the existing legislation.

In Australia ISP iiNet is facing a court challenge from AFACT, representing a number of movie houses, with AFACT alleging that iiNet failed to do sufficient to prevent illegal downloading by its customers when informed of breaches by AFACT.  However iTWire understands that iiNet was provided only with IP addresses from which the alleged offences occurred - which cannot be tied unambiguously to a particular individual, and further that, without an interception order from a court iiNet says it cannot examine the data streams of individual customers to identify material likely to be copyrighted.