New Zealand DMCA Moves Forward

nzgeek writes "The DMCA-like amendments to the New Zealand Copyright Act passed their first hurdle in parliament today, with an overwhelming 113 to 6 vote to pass the Bill to the Commerce Select Committee for further discussion. The detail-oriented can read the full debate (or rather lack of debate), and one enterprising New Zealand legal blogger has an excellent series of posts on the Bill, its background, and its implications. New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to make submissions to the Select Committee, before the committee makes its recommendations and sends the Bill back for a second reading."

Re:Democracy in Action?

[WK1]

Don't know much about anywhere else, but dirty political tricks here in the USA are standard. Some might even say required.

It's true what Col Mitchel said on Dakara, "I guess politics really do suck everywhere."

The smart move

[edwardpickman]

The best thing for everyone at this point would be for the investors in the entertainment industry to invest in oil futures and leave entertainment to Youtube. People get their free entertainment and the investors can still make money since oil stocks are likely to climb for the forseeable future. Okay the entertainment will mostly be Weird Al wantabes and uncle Simon getting hit in the nuts by a baseball but hey it'll be free and everyone will be happy.

Re:The smart move

[Chandon Seldon]

There's no reason to expect that entertainment quality would degrade overall if the entertainment industry gave up and copyright law was abolished entirely. We'd lose out on Britney Spears songs, but with Britney's marketing dept out of the way others could produce similar product for the ad revenues from product placement in music videos. I don't think you really fear pop music getting more commercialized.

Basically the only thing that wouldn't have a funding model is really high budget movies and video games. Perhaps that would give people an incentive to resort to such low-budget techniques as having a decent plot.

Re:New Zealand is a country of 4 million people.

[edwardpickman]

It gets attention because it's a western country with an above average interest in technology. I lived for seven months in New Zealand and six months in France, I'm a Yank myself. I found New Zealand on pare with France and England and the US as far as access and interest in technology. A lot of those 121 countries lack the access to technology that New Zealand, Europe and the US have. Not surprising there's a lot of references to New Zealand. I'm sure english speaking doesn't hurt as well. Even in Europe english speakers aren't as common as you'd think. When I was in Spain I found when they realized It didn't speak Spainish well they'd try French or Italian but few spoke english. English may be considered the current world language but a large number of people still speak little or no english. People forget but at one time French was considered the world language. One day I'm sure it'll be something else. When Slashdot is mostly Chinese they'll still be wondering why there are so many New Zealand references.

Re:Only the first reading

[Chandon Seldon]

...that copyright should be about providing incentive for content creators and any laws should be made with this fact firmly in mind

You do realize that the history and economic reality of copyright don't really support that assertion, right? Take a look at http://www.questioncopyright.org/faq [questioncopyright.org] for some actual background on the topic.

Is it really a bad thing?

[femto]

The more I think about it, I'm coming around to the idea that the DMCA (and its ilk) might not be the end of the world.

Think about it... What would your reaction be if you were in business and your chief competitor cut their own legs off at the knee caps? Would you view it as a bad thing?

Now recast that as RIAA and friends vs. Creative Commons and friends. Surely the DMCA will only serve to drive people towards the Commons?

So in the absence of the abolition of copyright, perhaps copyright+DMCA is a better position for the producers of Free content than copyright-DMCA? Think of the DMCA as the equivalent of the GPL's "liberty or death" clause, applied to the RIAA's content. The DMCA ensures that non-free content will die, leaving Free content to take its place.

Re:Why does anyone need a DMCA?

[MadJo]

And the work being "protected" has to actually be under copyright.

Everything you bring out nowadays is automatically copyrighted. Everything.
It used to be so that you had to register your copyright at an agency that kept a record of it, but that became expensive to maintain. So now every work that's put out, be that digitally, or on paper, on tape, on disk or any other means, is copyrighted.

You don't use copyright protection mechanisms to keep secrets, you use them to electronically enforce copyright

DMCA is also not an electronic protection means, that's DRM. Now, if DRM gets in the way of my fair use right (it is allowed to make 1 copy of a music disk for personal use, just to name one of the fair use terms that is hindered by DRM), then that DRM should be illegal, and I should be allowed to 'crack' it.

Do you really think that DRM and the DMCA stop the illegal sharing of copyrighted files?
If anything, DMCA is one of the most abused/misused law in the US. Just look for all those DMCA take-down notices on parody songs, or other legal uses of copyrighted works.

My Personal favorite DMCA abuse

[rsilvergun]

is Playstation 2 Memory cards. 8 Mb of flash ram for $25 bucks. Why? Because of what Sony affectionately terms "Magic Gate", a really basic system of controls for what can and cannot be copied from a memory card. Thanks to this stuff triggering the DMCA, we get no 3rd party Memory cards (except the Nyco ones, that are also $25 dollars). This kind of stuff is what the DMCA is all about. It's about giving companies absolute legal control over their products. Hell, Lexmark tried to use it to keep 3rd party printer cartridges off the market, and I'm still convinced the only reason they didn't succeed is the judge didn't want to have to pay more than he already was for the damn things.

So almost none have RTA

[delt0r]

So I have just read the whole thing. Takes a while. Anyway this is a long way from DMCA. Fair use is fully protected and now we have fair use (we didn't in NZ untill now). For NZ its a big step forward IMO.

Now when I say fair use I mean you are alowed to use cracks etc if the DRM is preventing fair use. You are can also distrubute these cracks providing you have ensured that its only going to be used for fair use provisions. Its by far the best "DMCA" i have seen. You are even able to decompile code to create interoperable products and the EULA cannot deny that right.

But its not perfect. I would like to see DRM vendors forced to respect fair use. And format shifting is for 2 years unless extended. There is also no expcit right to produce backups.