All posts by Thomas Beagle

Co-founder and spokesperson for Tech Liberty
copyright, guest article

Letter to Simon Power About Copyright Infringement

Tech Liberty was a co-signer on this letter to Simon Power about the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill.

The three main areas covered by the letter and briefing are:

  • Avoiding the possible reversal of burden of proof when people are accused of infringement (section 122MA).
  • Account holder liability for shared internet connections when the account holder would have no way of controlling the users of the connection.
  • Mechanism for activating the suspended “account suspension” provisions.

See our other articles about copyright issues in general and this law in particular.

ACTA, copyright, media release, TPP

Media Release: What, more secret treaty negotiations to change NZ’s copyright laws?

The fourth round of negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) starts in Auckland today. Nine countries are meeting to develop a free trade agreement covering a wide range of goods, but it looks as though the copyright maximalists are using it as an excuse to push their extremist position yet again.

The leaked New Zealand position paper clearly indicates that some participants are trying to push a “TRIPS Plus” agenda – an extension of the internationally agreed provisions in the WTO’s TRIPS agreement. This agenda, as seen in the South Korean and Australian free trade agreements with the USA, typically includes “three strikes and you’re out” Internet infringement laws, punitive minimum damages for copyright infringement, and would also limit access to currently available generic medicines.

Thomas Beagle, Tech Liberty, “New Zealand has already dodged the bullet of “guilt upon accusation” when section 92A of the Copyright Act was overturned, and then again when public pressure fixed the intellectual property provisions in the ACTA treaty. It looks as if the TPP is yet another attempt to push laws that sacrifice civil liberties for media and pharmaceutical company profits.”

Transparency in Treaty Negotiation

The TPP negotiations are being held in secret with citizens of the countries involved not allowed to know what their governments are saying. The traditional model for negotiating trade treaties means that the citizens of the countries concerned only get to see the text of the treaty after it’s finalised, making any public consultation a sham.

Just like with ACTA, information is escaping and NZ’s position paper on intellectual property has been leaked. It shows that the New Zealand government opposes a further extension of intellectual property rights saying that the economic arguments to do so are weak.

David Zanetti, Tech Liberty, “We’re disappointed that we’re reduced to finding the NZ government’s position through document leaks. Why can’t these position papers be published for everyone to see? It’s not like they’re secret from the other negotiating countries.”

Tech Liberty believes that the TPP and other similar treaties should be negotiated in public in the same way that UN treaties are. While countries can keep their negotiating bottom lines private, the papers and drafts should be published for others to see. ACTA was originally going to be a secret negotiation but it was leaked – and we ended up with a better treaty as a result. See our full article.

Thomas Beagle, Tech Liberty, “Openness and transparency helped fix the ACTA treaty, we believe that negotiating in the open would improve TPP too. People have a right to be consulted and for that consultation to be meaningful it has to happen before the text is finalised, not afterwards.”

References

Tech Liberty article calling for transparency in negotiating the TPP: https://techliberty.org.nz/acta-vs-tpp-the-case-for-transparency-in-international-treaty-negotiations/

Articles about leaked NZ position paper on IP provisions (includes links): http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1012/S00046/leaked-paper-nz-us-rift-on-intellectual-property-in-tppa.htm

Link to NZ position paper (PDF): http://www.citizen.org/documents/NZleakedIPpaper-1.pdf

About Tech Liberty

Tech Liberty is dedicated to protecting people’s rights in the areas of the Internet and technology. We make submissions on public policy, help to educate people about their rights, and defend those whose rights are being infringed.

ACTA, article, TPP

ACTA vs TPP: The Case for Transparency in International Treaty Negotiations

1 Comment

ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has shown us that openness when negotiating trade agreements leads to a better result – but it looks like this lesson that hasn’t been learnt by the negotiators of the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) free trade agreement.

At the beginning of the year Tech Liberty was involved in the campaign against the ACTA treaty. A major part of the problem with ACTA was that while we knew it was attempting to push more offensive IP laws, the secrecy around the negotiations meant we didn’t know what was in them.

Traditional Closed Model of Treaty Negotiation

ACTA followed the traditional model of negotiating a trade agreement (PDF), which goes something like this:

  1. A number of countries get together and decide to negotiate an agreement.
  2. The countries send their delegates to a series of meetings.
  3. The delegates discuss what sort of things will be in the treaty and come up with an agenda.
  4. Delegates present papers about particular topics.
  5. Work starts on a draft agreement.
  6. The delegates work through the draft removing points of difference.
  7. The text is finalised and returned to the governments for signing.
  8. In the democratic countries, the governments consult the people and then decide whether to sign the treaty or not.
  9. The governments make any required law changes and then sign the treaty.

You’ll note that the consultation with the people comes after the treaty text has been finalised. The process is structured so that there’s no chance that a government could consult, then come back to the negotiations and ask for more changes to be made (and indeed, this could be a bit chaotic).
Continue reading ACTA vs TPP: The Case for Transparency in International Treaty Negotiations →

commentary, conference

Kiwicon: RFID (in)securities

3 Comments

We’ll be writing some summaries of some of the relevant sessions at Kiwicon – the hacker conference in Wellington.

Anne Galloway from the VUW School of Design presented the keynote speech – RFID (in)securities. RFID tags are the tiny bits of circuitry that nearby scanners can read – such as used in Snapper cards and passports.

She brought a social anthropology view of RFID to a conference full of hardcore geeks and was brave enough to start by defining “discourse” and how it is used to create understanding. She then discussed three popular discourses around RFID:

  • RFID is awesome
  • RFID is evil
  • RFID is fun

Continue reading Kiwicon: RFID (in)securities →

article, filtering

Dear Independent Reference Group – Do Your Job

Dear Independent Reference Group,

Please do your job.

Yours, Tech Liberty

We believe that secret censorship is a threat to our democracy. We need to be careful when giving our government the ability to limit what we can see and hear – which is why we require the Chief Censor to publish their decisions. This openness, the ability for anyone to review and challenge, helps prevent abuse of the censorship scheme.

One of our objections to the government’s Internet censorship filter was that the Department of Internal Affairs has refused to release the list of censored sites. They say that they’ll only censor certain types of material, but how can we know that they’re sticking to this without being able to see the list?

The DIA did respond to these concerns by establishing the Independent Reference Group to provide at least some semi-independent oversight of the filter, although they had to be persuaded to let the IRG have access to the list of blocked sites. Then, from the minutes of the IRG’s meeting on 15th October 2010:

Members of the Group were invited to identify any website that they wish to review. They declined to do so at this stage.

Now, we quite understand that members of the IRG don’t want to look at those sites. But that’s not the point – they have a responsibility to ensure that the filter “…is operated with integrity and adheres to the principles set down in the Code of Practice.”

This oversight isn’t going to work if the IRG don’t exercise it. The filter list grew from 153 entries in June to 538 in November – surely it would have made sense to have a look at the list and select some of the additions for a brief review?

Recommendation

We recommend that at each meeting the IRG should randomly select a sample of newly added sites and review the content to ensure that the filter is not being abused. Anything less is neglecting their duty.

article, privacy

1-Day finds that anonymity is hard

10 Comments

Update: 1-Day claims that they have tweaked the feature so that customers can choose to use aliases. However, there appears to be no way to enter an alias when signing up for an account or proceeding through checkout without an account (18/11/2010).

Update 2: 1-Day support are unaware of any new alias feature. They suggest entering an initial instead of your first name. The site continues to publish live customer data (18/11/2010).

Update 3: 1-Day have now added a checkbox for “Make my purchase public” to the sale process and have included a link that explains the feature. We think that this is sufficient notification and allows people to opt out if they wish, although it would be better if the checkbox was not ticked by default (23/11/2010).

1-Day is another of the many “deal a day” sites. An extra feature on this particular site is Watch People Shop – a dynamic map of NZ with “Sharon in Lower Hutt bought a Mistral Bread Maker 5 minutes ago” overlaid.
Continue reading 1-Day finds that anonymity is hard →

meta

Tech Liberty: looking back at our first year and forward to the next

We published our first article on Tech Liberty a year ago. In it we defined what we saw as the problem:

  • The government believes it has the power to intercept, search and block our communications – if they’re done over the Internet.
  • The media companies want to ignore the right to a fair trial and skip straight to the punishment phase – if you download music files instead of copying a CD.
  • Border agencies and the Police believe they have a right to unlimited access to your private data – but only if it’s on computer, not on paper.
  • The government wants to be able to punish others by disconnecting them from the Internet – but we wouldn’t ban people from using paper and pen.

There are those who think that they can ignore our existing rights and freedoms because new technology has made them obsolete.

We don’t agree.

Our First Year

Since then we’ve:

  • Written 70 articles for our website and published two guest editorials (security risks of internet filtering, copyright).
  • Received 15,000 visitors who looked at 27,000 pages and left 134 comments.
  • Made two written (Copyright, Search and Surveillance) and one oral submission (Search & Surveillance) to Parliamentary Select Committees.
  • Established an @TechLiberty Twitter presence with 287 followers and 469 updates.
  • Assisted people in their legal issues with Customs and Sky TV.
  • Written a guest editorial about internet filtering for the National Business Review.
  • Been quoted in a variety of online and print media and been interviewed on TV and radio.

Major issues we’ve written about and worked on include:

What’s Next

We’re pleased with what we’ve achieved in our first year. We think that these are important issues and that we’ve helped to influence people and improve the quality of debate around them.

We believe that New Zealand needs a group like Tech Liberty – while people like Internet NZ and the Creative Freedom Foundation continue to do good work, both have their own focus and we are the only group with a broader interest in defending the rights of New Zealanders in the digital sphere.

Some of the major issues we expect to be working on in our second year include:

  • The Trans Pacific Partnership – it appears that it’s going to be another attempt to impose draconian and unfair copyright laws in New Zealand.
  • The Search and Surveillance Bill – government has gone too far in the conflict between “law enforcement convenience” and “protecting our civil liberties”.
  • The Law Commission’s revamp of the Official Information Act – we want to see more openness and transparency in Government and think that modern online publishing technology is part of the solution.

As part of this we’re also looking at changing how we do things:

  • We are investigating what is involved with becoming a mass-membership organisation.
  • We intend to establish a fund to help finance our work.
  • Improving our internal communications so we can better support contributors all over the country.

Join Us

What we do need is more people to help us with this work.

We are currently a Wellington-based collective but we’re looking for people across the country who can help us with one or more of the following roles:

  • Join the core collective and work with us to develop Tech Liberty.
  • Providing professional legal assistance to help us in interpreting current and proposed laws and helping people who face legal problems.
  • Adopt an issue and become our internal expert, writing articles and submissions about it.
  • Assist us with advice about becoming a membership organisation.

Or, if you’ve just got a bee in your bonnet about a particular issue, write us a guest editorial.

Read about our principles and then send us an email, we’d love to hear from you.

copyright, guest article

Guest post: Letter to Mr Power re Copyright

Sam Fickling sent us a copy of his letter to the Commerce Minister, Simon Power, about the proposed changes to the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing Amendment) Bill. He has kindly given us permission to publish it here.

Mr Power,

Once again I believe that, for the most part, the ongoing modifications to the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill are improving the legislation and building a fair and workable framework with which to protect both rights holders and Internet users. However, the recent recommendation by the Commerce Committee to insert section 122MA into the bill has unfortunately brought the debate around this legislation back to where it started.

Originally, the main objection I, and many other individuals and organisations, had against the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill was the concept of ‘guilt upon accusation’. While this concept had been removed from more recent drafts of the bill, it has made a return with section 122MA. I must re-iterate my original objections to the concept of ‘guilt upon accusation’ and the fact that this is in complete contradiction to the established laws and legal principles of New Zealand where accused parties are innocent until proven guilty! Furthermore, in established legal principles, the burden of proof lies with the accuser and this should most certainly not be reversed “in recognition of uncertainty about findings of copyright infringement”!
Continue reading Guest post: Letter to Mr Power re Copyright →