Creating a Groundswell – “Guilt Upon Accusation”

Right now in New Zealand there is an uproar about a new piece of legislation due to be enacted very soon. Depending on your definition, section 92 of the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act 2008 (now there’s a mouth full!) calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny.

In an excellent example of “power to the people” a bunch of concerned citizens have launched the Creative Freedom Foundation which aims to bring widespread awareness to the issue.

This week the cause was given a huge boost when Stephen Fry, he of the 200k Twitter followers, joined in the campaign and blacked out his Twitter avatar as part of the “blackout”campaign.

Now there are two sides to every story and I’d urge anyone with an interest in both Intellectual Property and freedom of creativity to find out more and decide for themselves on the dangers of this act. As an into, s92A is reproduced below;

92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers

• “(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.

  “(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.