Neither Microsoft nor myself have any formal view (that I’m aware of) on Section 92 of New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act, a source of vigorous recent debate. It has certainly been interesting to follow though.
The Creative Freedom Foundation has done an outstanding job of getting their word out and orchestrating a global campaign against the clause, they have rocked sites like Facebook and Flickr, culminating in the blackout of web sites around the world on Monday of this week.
For the moment at least the CFF have achieved their goals, with the implementation of the clause being delayed by a month while it goes though an additional round of review.
What I have not read is much commentary on the other side of the debate. One of those rare articles appeared in NZ’s National Business Review today, authored by Chris Keall.
His first “myth” changes the tone of the debate a little for me;
MYTH: you can be disconnected from your ISP after three accusations.
FACT: S92 (to call the clause by its Twitter abbreviation), says “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.” And … that’s it.The Telecommunications Carriers Forum, TCF, representing all the major ISPs (including Telecom, TelstraClear and Vodafone) has duly drafted a code that calls for a series of “customer notices”. Notices will be sent on a monthly basis, and you’ll need to be get at least three – that is, over three months – before any termination notice is issued. The accused gets right of reply to each accusation in a process that extends for 18 months.
That seems odd to me, I’d been led to believe that if I was accused of copyright violation by an NZ ISP then I would be instantly removed from the internet.
The rest of Chris’ article is worth a read as he digs into several aspects of the ongoing conversation about Section 92.
This highlights something that is an ongoing challenge for me personally. The internet has been used as a tool in several recent campaigns, be it this S92 debate, the election of the current US president or the conversation that I was personally involved in around the standardization of IS29500, the Open XML file format.
Clearly where representatives of both sides of a debate choose to turn to the internet as a means of disseminating their views then it is possible for anybody to research both sides of the debate and come to their own educated conclusions.
Increasingly though as the internet is used as a core component of some political campaigns both sides of the debate are not represented when a user turns to their search engine of choice. Instead all of the “facts” unearthed when searching the net only tell half the story but appear to be one well represented and empirical point of view.
The folks at CFF need to be congratulated for the campaign that they ran, if there is anybody on this other side of the S92 discussion then they need to wake up to the fact that the internet is increasingly the single source that people are turning to for information on issues such as this and they need to invest in getting their own word out.
Personally I want to see balance in a debate, I don’t want to feel that others are making my decisions for me. For the moment at least, it is rare that I can find contradicting facts on issues that have been taken up as important points of discussion on the internet.
I’ll heed the warning from Jim Donovan earlier this week, “blackout success, but beware the mob”.