NZ Illegal Downloading Crackdown Law In Effect 329
First time accepted submitter sfranklin writes "As of Sept 1 at midnight, 'anyone caught downloading copyrighted content illegally could face fines of up to $15,000 and have their internet cut off' in New Zealand. You don't even have to do the deed yourself. The 'account holder needs to know what's going on even if they themselves don't do anything online ...' Scary stuff, although I wonder how much actual enforcement is likely to happen."
As culture dies in New Zealand (Score:4, Interesting)
Chronicles of Ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
1. All Content is Copyright by default.
2. How do you distinguish the legal from the illegal content?
Re:Not all bad (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd invest a couple of bucks a month to rent a seedbox in Burkina Faso or Tonga.
My connection has improve dramatically (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't been able to hit 5Mbps for 3-4 years (it's not much, but I'm in rural New Zealand), and I've never been able to stream video in high quality, but tonight I'm totally able to. My ping is only 25ms, and I never thought it would be possible to have a ping so low. Now I can play games online!
I was against it, but, maybe it's not such a bad thing? What do you guys think?
Re:As culture dies in New Zealand (Score:4, Interesting)
NZ is the only English speaking country I've been to where the music scene isn't dominated by US or UK bands/artists. Local bands regularly make up a fair portion of the charts.
NZ's trademark sound is a Maori influenced 'pacific' flavour of reggae/dub (check out Fat Freddy's Drop), but drum & bass (and d&b influenced stuff like dubstep) is also much more popular in the mainstream than elsewhere. There's also quite a few decent homegrown alternative/rock groups, some of which have achieved international success. I have listed some of the most popular NZ originated bands/artists in the last 10 years.
Roots/Dub/Reggae
Fat Freddy's Drop
Katchafire
Salmonella Dub
The Black Seeds
Trinity Roots
International Observer
Rock/Punk/Metal etc
Stereogram
The Mint Chicks
Evermore
Minuit
The Datsuns
Head Like a Hole
Fur Patrol
8 Foot Sativa
Dawn of Azazel
Drum & Bass
Concord Dawn
The Upbeats
Shapeshifter
Re:Illegal law in most countries (Score:2, Interesting)
Except that it's practically impossible for someone to be driving your car without you knowing about it.
Unless they were driving it illegally, in which case you'd have a total defense.
Does an equivalent defense exist for internet usage? If so, then there's a simple solution:
Every day or so, submit a filing to the NZ Police, to the affect of:
"I have reason to believe, having just reviewed my logs, that at some point on [day], a person or persons without authorization to access my WiFi probably downloaded copyrighted material. Should you wish to investigate further, these logs will be kept available for an officer to collect in person, until my next review in about 24 hours' time."
Insist upon a report number every time (hint: they won't give you one. They'll give you an "information number" instead, which means "any person quoting this number is wasting our time").
Then, you'll always have a complete defense!
CAPTCHA: idealism
Some good links (Score:3, Interesting)
here is some good reading by a leading NZ IP lawyer, on the new law...
http://lawgeeknz.posterous.com/copyright-cheapskates [posterous.com]
and http://lawgeeknz.posterous.com/nzs-copyright-proposal-guilty-until-you-prove [posterous.com]
Re:Not all bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Illegal law in most countries (Score:5, Interesting)
While nice in theory, it has a downside... I'm originally from NZ but haven't lived there in a long time. When I did though, I was once talking to a guy on IRC who was pretty seriously talking about doing some rather nasty things involving explosives and a jet liner... While I couldn't be certain if he was serious or not, I decided to do the right thing and let the police know about it.
What happened for doing my civic duty? Well, the police turn up at my house with a search warrant citing "attempted murder and breach of the telecommunications act" (interesting combo, but yes, that's what it said) and took all my computers away to "investigate". Several months later, I finally got them back, with the HDD wiped on a couple and the power switch physically broken on one.
I made a complaint to the police complaints authority, but was essentially ignored the whole time.
Only minor plus was I got in the Southland Times (newspaper) and it raised a fair bit of attention with the general public (enough that people recognised me on the street for a few months)
Back on the topic at hand: If you did do something like you suggest, I'd expect similar treatment would ensue...