Having lunch watching the pre-tutorial lock picking shenanigans at Kiwicon my mind naturally turned to the legal implications of wandering around with a set of lock picking tools.

Ten minutes of research found three provisions of note, two from the Crimes Act 1961 and another from the Summary Offences Act 1961. Basically two relate to possession of tools capable of being used for burglary, the other concerns possession of an instrument capable of being used for taking or converting a vehicle, plane or ship.

Of interest to me is the difference with regard to intent. Whilst the Crimes Act 1961 provisions refer to intent (mens rea) the Summary Offences Act refers to "circumstances that prima facie show an intention" therefore the actual intent of the person carrying the tools is not considered. 

The provisions:

Possession of burglary tools - s 14 Summary Offences Act 1961

"Every person is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceed­ing 3 months or a fine not exceeding $2,000 who, without rea­sonable excuse, has in his possession any instrument capable of being used for burglary in circumstances that prima facie show an intention to use it for burglary."

Crimes Act 1961

Section 227 - Being in possession of instrument for conversion

"Every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 1 year who, without lawful authority or excuse, has in his or her possession any instrument capable of being used for taking or converting any vehicle, ship, or aircraft with intent to use it for such a purpose."

Section 233 - Being disguised or in possession of instrument for burglary

"(1) Every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 years who, without lawful authority or excuse,—

(a) has in his or her possession any instrument capable of being used for burglary with intent to use it for such a purpose; or

(b) has his or her face covered or is otherwise disguised with intent to commit any crime.

(2) If any person is convicted of being in possession of an instrument for burglary, the court may, if it thinks fit, order the in- strument to be forfeited to the Crown or disposed of as the court directs at the expense of the convicted person, and may order the person to pay any reasonable cost incurred by the Commissioner of Police in retaining the instrument."

Having the entire collection of in force legislation is a good thing if you're a law student and for that matter a practicing lawyer. So a few years ago I created a Python script to download PDF versions of all NZ legislation.

Later I made use of the xml versions available and the RSS feed of new, amended or modified legislation to create the twitter bot @nzlegislation

In the past I have created a couple of visualisations of the legislation.

One was an animated sequence showing the relationships between acts develop as each act was passed. However it wasn't historically accurate since it only had access to those acts still in force and visually became a mess that didn't communicate anything of value.

The second I started for last year's Mix & Mash competition and was a more prosaic effort, using a tree map to visualise the legislation. Whilst it did communicate some useful information I didn't feel it was a tool that would be of significant utility and didn't submit it.

This year the guardians of the legislation, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, are a sponsor of the Mix & Mash competition. They are sponsoring the Open Government category and have some suggested legislative mash ups they would like to see.

So if you're interested in putting an entry together using the legislation I can offer a Python script which may help. You'll get XML and PDF copies of every version of every Act, Bill, SOP and Regulation available. Given a reasonable ADSL connection you should have the lot down in 8-12 hours. Put aside approximately 39 Gig of bandwidth and disk. 

Yesterday I was asked to help an organisation out.

They had previously published a number of books. Having just done a deal to have the books published in the UK they needed to send the original text over. 

Unfortunately all they had were the QuarkXpress files of the final layouts. Contractually they needed to send Word files.

The layouts for each book contained over 500 separate chunks of text. So a simple select all and copy was out of the question.

After trying a couple of tactics I decided a scripting solution was the only way to sanely achieve their goal. 

I found some relevant AppleScripts however they didn't work. Though they provided me with enough insight into the QuarkXpress script dictionary to be able to create a Python based solution using the Appscript Apple event bridge.

Seven simple lines of code that saved someone days of copying and pasting. I share this simple script in case anyone else in the googlable world needs a quick solution to extract all the text from a QuarkXpress document.

from appscript import *
import codecs

stories = app('QuarkXpress').documents[1].stories()
f = codecs.open('text_extracted.txt', 'wt', 'utf-8')
for s in stories:
    f.write(s)
f.close()

A few years ago whilst driving to the Horowhenua I decided to go the scenic route, via Route 41 aka the lost highway.

As I went through NZ novelist Ronald Hugh Morrison's home town of Hawera I decided to see what there was that celebrated his works.

There was bugger all. However the woman in the tourist info centre did point out that the Morrison's house had been bowled and currently was the site of a KFC. She thought there was something on the site to state as much. So I went and yes there was. As you can see there is a plaque inside the KFC.

From the KFC you see a house with a tower. It's not the rickety vision from the film but when I saw it I immediately recalled the tower from the novel Predicament.

(download)

Click here to download:

not-ronald-macdonald-gIvtHqGsCvlnjpyBebHf.zip (1.16 MB)

As part of the Law and Information Technology course we reviewed the proposed amendments to the Copyright Act 1994 that are contained within the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill 2010 (199-1).

I create flowcharts to help me comprehend statute. It's the doing that is important but they also come in handy during exams - where despite being open book, you only have time to consult a flowchart or a sparse outline. However I thought I'd share the results, they are quite focused in comparison to the overview that the MED's diagram provides (unfortunately no publicly accessible online version of theirs is available to link to).

It goes without saying that these are a Law student's interpretation of the first bill and they don't pretend to give a comprehensive view of the provisions - so viewer beware. However I hope they may be helpful.

It will be interesting to see what the Select Committee come back with.

Click here to download:

s_122_Flowchart.pdf (472 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

s_122_Flowchart.pdf (472 KB)

CO = copyright owner
AH = account holder
DC = District Court

At today's InternetNZ seminar on the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing Amendment) Bill, I asked the MED representative Peter Bartlett what the government's stance on notice fees was, specifically whether the notice fees payable by copyright holders (under proposed s 122R) would be set a level that would enable ISPs to recover the costs associated for the new regime. I cannot recall his response verbatim but he indicated that it was government's view that there would not be full cost recovery and pointed me to the Cabinet Paper (PDF) for the details.

Here's the relevant section.

"39    I recommend that ISPs meet their own costs in collecting, maintaining and processing data to meet their obligations under this process. However, I recommend that right holders should pay a fee (notice fee), set by regulation, to the relevant ISP for every notice sent by the ISP, to cover the ISP’s administration cost for issuing notices."

This makes it quite clear it is the government's view that the large capital costs required of ISPs, to implement the system development to meet their obligations under the new provisions, should fall on the ISPs. 

Given there are approximately 37 ISPs  and that the implementation cost for a large ISP has been estimated at $500K+ one can see that the total implementation cost across NZ will be significant.

Update: I'm aware that I am somewhat late to this realisation.  David Farrar and Pat Pilcher raised the issue in Feburary.

To use the square bracket within the prefix or suffix of a cite command wrap the contents with parens.

e.g. \footcite[Case C-101/01][{[47]}]{ReBodilLindqvist}

Have retired the old server and content, and have switched to posterous for syntho.org