What
New Zealand Parliament has passed the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Act, aimed at reducing Internet piracy.
Here’s 10 things that you need to know about it:
- What: Infringing file sharing is the act of downloading or uploading copyrighted content without permission. This can apply to any content, e.g. movies, TV shows, music, pictures, books, games or software.
- When. The new law comes into effect from September 1st 2011. You can receive a notice for infringing file sharing that took place from any time from August 10th (21 days before Sept 1st). Mobile phones are excluded until 30 September 2013.
- Who. The account holder (the person who pays for the internet conection) is the one who is legally responsible for any infringing file sharing occurring over that connection. You are not legally liable if you use someone else’s internet connection, although they won’t be very happy about it and may be able to come after you.
- Getting caught. You are most likely to get caught if you (or somone on your Internet connection) uses peer-to-peer file-sharing software (e.g. BitTorrent, emule, etc). This is because peer to peer works by you sharing the file with a whole lot of other people – if one of them works for the copyright-holders they can get enough information to make a complaint.
- Not getting caught. You are not likely to get caught if you copy files from friends, download from file-sharing websites (that don’t use torrent software), or watch videos on YouTube or similar sites.
- Notices. If caught infringing, you will initially receive a Detection Notice, followed by a Warning Notice, then an Enforcement Notice. There must be at least three weeks between notices. (Each copyright-holder making complaints will follow the same progression – you could have a Warning Notice from one and a Detection Notice from another).
- Challenging notices. You can respond with a challenge to any notice (you must respond within 14 days). The copyright-holder gets to decide whether your challenge will be accepted or not. There are no agreed grounds for challenges yet. (Should you get a notice, please see the Netstop section below titled Responding to a notice)
- Personal details. The copyright-holder will not be given your name, address and other contact details. All communication is handled by your internet provider.
- Copyright Tribunal. Once you have received an Enforcement Notice the matter will go to the Copyright Tribunal. They can levy of a penalty of up to $15,000 that has to be paid to the copyright-holder. They will normally make decisions based on written submissions, but either party can request a hearing. Lawyers are not allowed at the hearing.
- Account suspension. The provision in the law allowing for an internet account to be cut-off is currently suspended.
Thanks to Tech Liberty NZ for the above information.
What you should do NOW.
- Ensure your own office computers and laptops have no illegal movies on them and make sure you remove any p2p software. P2p software has names like eDonkey, eMule, Shareaza, KazaA, iMesh, GnutellaBearShare, Limewire, MLDonkey, Gnutella & BearShare, if you’re unsue about how to do this, or for an audit, please contact your IT professional.
- Ensure that your staff are aware that there are now heavy fines for using these applications on an Internet connection. Many companies may want to review their employment contracts to cover Internet piracy.
What is Netstop doing?
Netstop NZ has put some measures in place to assist in being on the right side of this new law.
- Firewall rules – we attempt to block this type of traffic before it reaches your internet connection, but the nature of this p2p software means that this is pretty futile. If blocking were technically possible, then your ISP (Xtra, Orcon, Telstra) would do it for you.
- Explicit Terms and Conditions agreed to by guests, when using WiFi your guests must now accept an explicit check box, saying they agree to our terms of service.
- Low Gigabyte limits to discourage file sharing – We don’t give guests huge gigabyte limits, this means that downloading movies would usually cost them more than just buying the DVD.
- Our Internet kiosks have no P2P software - Our internet kiosks have no P2P software loaded, so cannot be used for P2P. Also our Kiosks usually have a time limit of 60 minutes or less which is not enough time to download a movie.
- We are also looking at ways of fingerprinting suspicious internet traffic so that our system can automatically block users who are using P2P software.
Responding to a notice.
If you receive a notice please email Netstop and we’ll send you more information on how to respond.
More Information
- Read the Law Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011 No 11, Public Act
- New Zealand Computer Society post
- New Zealand passes 3 strikes law