Sky’s Takedown Notices – Justice or Intimidation?

It’s a pretty scary thing to receive a legal letter from the law firm of a large corporate, especially when they claim that you’re in breach of their rights and then make a series of demands. Going to court is very expensive and even if you’re in the right, do you have enough money to be a test case? If you lose you might end up not only having to pay your own costs but those of the company who sued you. The threat of legal action is pretty intimidating for most people.

Sky TV is currently sending such letters to a number of people (see an example here). These are their own paying customers, who just want to watch Sky TV on their home-made entertainment systems. So why is Sky doing it? Before we can answer that question we’ll have to explain a little bit about electronic program guides.
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ACTA: Say hello to statutory damages

Update: After further analysis and discussion with NZ officials we believe that the current draft of the ACTA agreement would allow New Zealand to maintain its current damages scheme as represented by the (c) option in the agreement (additional punitive damages are decided by the judge). This means that New Zealand would not have to adopt a statutory damages regime to comply with ACTA.

Original article follows:


There’s a new ACTA draft leak out, thanks to La Quardature. And does it contain a shocker when comparing the new and last leaked texts.

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Report on public talk: Open Connectivity, Open Data

Jonathan Penney, the Cyberlaw Fellow at Victoria University gave a public talk about the idea of “internet as a right” and whether there is any basis for this in current New Zealand law.

He started by looking at s14 of the 1990 Bill of Rights Act. This is about freedom of expression:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.

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ACTA: Bad for Civil Liberties

We’ve been writing about the ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty for a while. We believe that copyright law and enforcement will need to change but also believe that everyone should participate in creating new laws, not just big business and their proxies. As such, we strongly objected to the secrecy around the negotiations and called for New Zealand to withdraw. We also made a submission to the Ministry of Economic Development about the digital enforcement provisions section.

The secrecy around ACTA caused problems for critics because, while much of the contents had been leaked, it was difficult to analyse the draft treaty without solid information. This all changed after the last meeting in Wellington, where global public pressure forced them to release the current draft (pdf) of the treaty.

Now we have the text to look at, were our fears justified? In this article we concentrate on some of the ways that the draft ACTA treaty encroaches on our civil liberties.
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FAQ : Trans Pacific Partnership

New Zealand is one of the four original members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement. Other countries (Australia, the USA, Peru and Vietnam) are now interested in joining the agreement. It is referred to as both TPP and TPPA.

This FAQ answers some of the frequently asked questions about the TPP. It was last updated on 16th May 2011.

Contents:

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