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Quick Summary:
Bill: Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill
First Reading: 12.12.2006
Submissions Due: 16.2.2007
The NZ Copyright Act is in the process of being amended, and the bill was recently introduced to Parliament. The Copyright Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation that relates to the Internet, music, software, and all digital media, so any changes to this Act will possibly have a huge impact on what a lot of geekzone users do, on a day-to-day basis. Many of the changes proposed will align New Zealand closely to the much-discussed US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA).
Sadly enough, a couple of years ago when the government started looking at this issue, the government report from MED (linked below) seemed well aware of the dangers of making a DCMA clone act, but the publishing industry lobbyists have since then managed to heavily influence the bill so as to disregard the government’s fears.
Examples of issues this law will affect:
Format Shifting
Format shifting from a legally purchased music CD to the MP3 (or other) format for loading to an onboard memory based music player is currently illegal in NZ. The Copyright Amendment Act seeks to make this (and similar formshifting) legal. But the proposed changes will be almost useless, and, to make this worse, the format shifting clause will expire two years after this bill becomes law. So assuming you buy a music CD without copy protection, you will be able to rip it onto your computer to upload to your music player without breaking the law. Assuming that you do not violate any contract (say a TOS/EULA) that prohibits you doing this, you do not violate any DRM/TDM, or you do it within two years of the law being passed.
Technical Protection Measures (TPM)
This is what the government report said in 2003:
“It is the Ministry's view that it is not the role of the Act to protect access control technology, which is used in some cases to price discriminate and control geographical distribution of works, to the detriment of New Zealand users” (link below)
Now, analysis suggests that the following might happen:
“The actual law as proposed would make it unlawful to use a DVD player to play out of zone DVDs or games for consoles, selling multi-zone players would be a crime, sharing information on playing DVDs on Linux will be a crime. The ability to format or time shift is also revealed as fundamentally meaningless as the only people who will be able to do it in practice will be librarians and teachers, and every time they do it they'll have to wait a month for the paperwork to be processed.”
(http://artemis.utdc.vuw.ac.nz:8000/pebble/2006/12/14/1166050595386.html)
So what can be done? The Bill is open to submissions till 16 February 2007. That is the last date we, the consumers, have to make our opinions known. Read the bill, look at the provisions, if you have any thoughts, post them here, or write to the members of the Commerce Committee, or even make a submission.
Oh, and yes, this bill has made me a little emo.
Links
Parliamentary Speeches given on the introduction of the bill.
http://www.hansard.parliament.govt.nz/hansard/Final/FINAL_2006_12_13.htm#_Toc153959611
http://www.knowledge-basket.co.nz/gpprint/docs/bills/20061021.txt
Clause by clause analysis of the Bill by an interested party
http://artemis.utdc.vuw.ac.nz:8000/pebble/2006/12/13/1165977437069.html
Government Discussion from the Ministry of Economic Development from 2001
http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/MultipageDocumentTOC____866.aspx
Petition to stop the Bill being a DCMA clone
http://www.petitiononline.com/nodrm/petition.html
[Moderator edit (MF): fixed links]
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