It’s going to be a week of ACTA in Wellington, New Zealand.
On Saturday (April 10th) we have PublicACTA organised by InternetNZ. It’s a chance for people who oppose ACTA to get together and discuss how to stop it. Guest speakers include Canadian law professor Michael Geist and Australian academic Kim Weatherall.
Then, the following week (April 12-16th) there’s the latest round of the official ACTA negotiations.
Why we oppose ACTA
We oppose the attempt to take away people’s rights (due process, freedom of speech, right to own and use property) in an attempt to protect the business models of the big media and pharmaceutical industries.
We oppose the secrecy around the ACTA negotiations. Democratic societies should debate their laws in public.
We oppose the way that the ACTA treaty is an attempt to legislate by treaty, avoiding the normal democratic process in each of the participating countries.
The Ministry of Economic Development asked for submissions about the Digital Enforcement Provisions in the ACTA treaty.
While we object to New Zealand’s participation in the treaty, we still thought it was worthwhile to respond. The full text follows (headings correspond to those in the request for submissions), but the 8 recommendations we made are:
The ACTA treaty should note that ISPs are not liable for the actions of their users.
That ACTA includes a “notice and counter-notice” regime where complainants can pay ISPs to deliver a notice to the account holder for an IP address at a particular time, and the ISP can pass responses back to the complainant.
That ACTA specifies that complainants should be able to obtain the identity of a user from the ISP only after a court order has been obtained.
That ACTA makes no attempt to encourage mutually supportive relationships between ISPs and rights holders.
That ACTA should recognise that anti-TPM measures have a useful and lawful purpose.
That ACTA should insist that participating countries allow consumer rights-holders the right to create, buy and use anti-TPM software and devices if these are used for lawful purposes.
That ACTA should forbid the use of TPMs that limit the reasonable and customary rights of people to enjoy the use of the rights that they have purchased or otherwise legally obtained, unless the supplier also undertakes to provide unprotected versions when required.
That ACTA should not include enforcement measures concerning the removal or modification of copyright management information.
With the leak of the full text of ACTA, complete with every nuance of positions by the various countries involved, we have the first full and complete picture of what our government is up to.
Last week we announced that the New Zealand internet filter had “gone live” and was now being used to filter the connections for users of two ISPs (Watchdog and Maxnet), with more expected to follow.
The obvious question has to be, why was Tech Liberty announcing something that the Department of Internal Affairs had done? Where was their announcement that the filter had gone live on the 1st of February? Don’t civil servants have a duty to communicate to the people that they serve? Continue reading Department of Internal Affairs failing on open government→
We’d like to welcome our first guest author, Gerard Creamer. He’s written an article that explains some of the security risks inherent in implementing a centralised filtering system. It’s a little more technical than most of the articles we publish; we hope you find it interesting.
The Department of Internal Affairs has admitted that the internet filter is now operational and is already being used by ISPs Maxnet and Watchdog. It appears that Maxnet have not told their customers that they are diverting some of their internet traffic to the government system to be filtered.
One of the big questions about the implementation of internet filtering in New Zealand has been … when? We’ve made a number of Official Information Act requests to the Department of Internal Affairs and the answer has always been “in the next couple of months”.
By now you’ve probably heard about the government’s plans to filter the internet in New Zealand. It’s coming soon to an internet connection near you.
At Tech Liberty we believe that:
the filtering won’t work to stop the production and distribution of offensive material.
that it poses a risk to the security and stability of the New Zealand internet.
that filtering is the wrong approach and will inevitably be misused in the future.
We want the filter stopped.
We’re looking for other people who feel the same way to join us in forming a coalition to oppose the implementation of the filter.
Join the coalition
If you want to be part of the it, please contact us at stopthefilter@techliberty.org.nz and tell us how you’d like to get involved and what you can do. We’re going to need all the help we can get.
Sign up in support
If you want to register your support and be on the mailing list, send us an email at antifilter@techliberty.org.nz and ask to be added to the internet filtering mail list.
With the release of the text of the new copyright bill proposed at the end of 2009 we finally see the end of guilt on accusation, and see in place a sensible and well reasoned process around protecting copyrighted material. The new text deals with the majority of the issues that Tech Liberty has been concerned about, restores due process and privacy for those accused, and spells out a fair set of obligations and responsibilities for ISPs in handling users who infringe on copyright via their services.
There have been recent claims that access to a number of international websites was deliberately blocked for New Zealand internet users.
Clare Swinney at InfoNews writes that Orcon, Slingshot and Telecom have blocked access to infowar.com and prisonplanet.tv, sites run by documentary maker and conspiracist Alex Jones. Continue reading Technical failure, not censorship→