WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2011
The Flintstones of the Cyber Age..
The government's reputation took a turn for the worst last night and for several reasons. Trying to slide the controversial file-sharing legislation through under urgency - supposedly that was for earthquake related legislation - has left them with egg on their faces for a number of reasons.
The first is indeed that the bill had no business being passed under urgency, it needed to be looked at again and some of the relevance of it discussed after the various political parties and MP's had a chance to get a much firmer grasp of their understanding of the internet than they obviously currently have.
Let's look at how this bill works. The idea in a nutshell is that if you are caught sharing 'copyrighted' files, then after three warnings, the Copyright Tribunal has the right to fine you up to $15,000 and to send you (in two years time, after the review) to the District Court who can order your ISP to shut you down for up to six months.That's of course as long as it's you that holds the account.
Riiiight.
So for Mrs Bloggs 16 year old son who likes to download movies he doesn't pay for using Mum's account which she knows not a lot about - what is the legislation going to achieve?
If I decide to buy prepaid broadband via a stick, and use it to download whatever - how exactly is that going to work from an ISP perspective?
Oh but wait.. there is someone who made this comment, and I'll quote it from the Stuff source here:
"Everybody just keep doing what you're doing. They can't stop us. This is just a scare tactic. The internet was built on open sharing of information and forever will be the case.
No one actually steals an entire movie or CD, when sharing you are just transferring tid bits (sic) of the whole from all over the place. Then whatever program you are using puts all of these parts together.
If they really cared about it, why not ban the programs that put all of the little bits together?
Why this bill was passed so urgently is the real question that needs to be answered. The NZ government is corrupt"
This person raises some salient points.
The legislation itself reminds me of a farmer who has a fox killing his chickens. To fix the problem, he shoots the rooster.
It does not address the problem in any way that is likely to be workable. At the first sign of a court battle, they are going to lose, because the issue is exactly that the downloader has not brought down one single byte of information that makes up a file from a specific place or source - but a huge array of bits from a wide variety of sources. That the software then puts it all together to produce a finished file that someone can lay copyright to in terms of what it looks or sounds like is an incidental factor from a legal perspective. It can't be any other way, in reality.
Next you have to look at how on earth they think this is police-able in the first place. For gamers who play a lot, their downloading potential is very similar in terms of the amount as say, someone who likes to download 10 to 20 songs a month. You cannot tell what is being downloaded, only the amount of the bandwidth used. So does this mean the government is going to be able to severely cut down on the unemployed numbers by employing everyone without a job to actually physically look into every account holder's pc? Because that is what would have to happen for this Bill to have any teeth. Withdrawing servioce on suspicion is absolutely not democratic - and I cannot see how it could be upheld in a court.
Sure, if four or five movies are being downloaded, that is going to take a lot of grunt. But all that will happen then is someone out there will invent a way to highly compress the file size.
I don't condone people downloading copyrighted files that the owners could make money from if they were legitimately paid for; it would be like someone using my blog content without my permission on their own site. My work for free? Course not.
But as far as the government is concerned, they've put through a Bill that hasn't been thought through properly and for what? To make themselves and by proxy, the rest of us kiwis appear to be the Flintstones of the Cyber Age.
The first is indeed that the bill had no business being passed under urgency, it needed to be looked at again and some of the relevance of it discussed after the various political parties and MP's had a chance to get a much firmer grasp of their understanding of the internet than they obviously currently have.
Let's look at how this bill works. The idea in a nutshell is that if you are caught sharing 'copyrighted' files, then after three warnings, the Copyright Tribunal has the right to fine you up to $15,000 and to send you (in two years time, after the review) to the District Court who can order your ISP to shut you down for up to six months.That's of course as long as it's you that holds the account.
Riiiight.
So for Mrs Bloggs 16 year old son who likes to download movies he doesn't pay for using Mum's account which she knows not a lot about - what is the legislation going to achieve?
If I decide to buy prepaid broadband via a stick, and use it to download whatever - how exactly is that going to work from an ISP perspective?
Oh but wait.. there is someone who made this comment, and I'll quote it from the Stuff source here:
"Everybody just keep doing what you're doing. They can't stop us. This is just a scare tactic. The internet was built on open sharing of information and forever will be the case.
No one actually steals an entire movie or CD, when sharing you are just transferring tid bits (sic) of the whole from all over the place. Then whatever program you are using puts all of these parts together.
If they really cared about it, why not ban the programs that put all of the little bits together?
Why this bill was passed so urgently is the real question that needs to be answered. The NZ government is corrupt"
This person raises some salient points.
The legislation itself reminds me of a farmer who has a fox killing his chickens. To fix the problem, he shoots the rooster.
It does not address the problem in any way that is likely to be workable. At the first sign of a court battle, they are going to lose, because the issue is exactly that the downloader has not brought down one single byte of information that makes up a file from a specific place or source - but a huge array of bits from a wide variety of sources. That the software then puts it all together to produce a finished file that someone can lay copyright to in terms of what it looks or sounds like is an incidental factor from a legal perspective. It can't be any other way, in reality.
Next you have to look at how on earth they think this is police-able in the first place. For gamers who play a lot, their downloading potential is very similar in terms of the amount as say, someone who likes to download 10 to 20 songs a month. You cannot tell what is being downloaded, only the amount of the bandwidth used. So does this mean the government is going to be able to severely cut down on the unemployed numbers by employing everyone without a job to actually physically look into every account holder's pc? Because that is what would have to happen for this Bill to have any teeth. Withdrawing servioce on suspicion is absolutely not democratic - and I cannot see how it could be upheld in a court.
Sure, if four or five movies are being downloaded, that is going to take a lot of grunt. But all that will happen then is someone out there will invent a way to highly compress the file size.
I don't condone people downloading copyrighted files that the owners could make money from if they were legitimately paid for; it would be like someone using my blog content without my permission on their own site. My work for free? Course not.
But as far as the government is concerned, they've put through a Bill that hasn't been thought through properly and for what? To make themselves and by proxy, the rest of us kiwis appear to be the Flintstones of the Cyber Age.
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