Today, Parliament will pass changes to the Copyright Act that will make it punishable to download content from the Internet. What is understood from the discussion at parliament last night is that they are only targeting peer to peer (P2P) services such as Bit Torrent, Kazaa, Cabos (also known as Limewire) and other file sharing mediums including (but not limited to) Rapidshare, MegaUpload, Hotfile.com and other sources of free downloads of intellectual property (such as software, music, electronic books for example).
Have a read of the new legislation: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/0119/latest/whole.html?search=ts_bill_Copyright+%28Infringing+File+Sharing%29+Amendment+Bill_resel&p=1#tmpn1011a
Namely, I suggest you read sections: 122A, 122B, 122C, 122E and 122F although the whole thing is important.
A small breakdown of how this will come in effect:
- Charlie downloads the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie from a leading public bittorrent website such as ThePirateBay (almost all bittorrent downloads are from a public tracker) [copyright infringement made]
- MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) contacts Charlies’ ISP – in this example, it is Orcon Internet Limited
- Orcon Internet Limited verifies the IP (Internet Protocol) Address to an account that is owned by Charlie
- Orcon Internet Limited issues a warning letter [cease and desist] to Charlie
- Charlie has 7 days to acknowledge the request and make necessary modifications to his Internet habits to not make this mistake again. (Strike 1/3 recorded)
- If Charlie is smart, he will stop downloading content from public trackers. Since Charlie does not understand all of this, he repeats the offence. A maximum of three strikes is recorded against Charlie.
- Charlies’ information is handed to the MPAA who will contact the local disputes tribunal or district court (depending on how angry they are at Charlie).
- Charlie loses access to his Internet account with Orcon Internet Limited and can be fined upto $15,000 in damages.
Knowing the MPAA, they will also find other ways to steal all of your money.
Interestingly, if you are a school, library or university, you are exempted from the rule as you cannot fully comply with it, however your network systems must be able to produce the information if an infringement notice is served.
So moral of the story: Because of this, hardcore internet users who downloads gigs and gigs of movies, games, music and other things are more likely to get booted off the Internet for six months. If they repeat the offence they may get prosecuted and fined $15k or more. This is a good and bad thing. Good: Everyone will notice in increase in their Internet speed – as in browsing pages and permissible downloading of content will not take ages as not that many people will be clogging the (Internet) infrastructure with downloads. The bad: well you don’t get movies, games, music, anime etc before release in NZ… anymore.
Be safe. Download carefully.