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)

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