Discontent continues to fester on copyright front

27.04.2011
The passage of the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill has if anything intensified rather than calmed the storm of discussion on the issue and the threat of restrictive intellectual property clauses in the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement (TPPA) is adding to discontent.

Commentators have accused the Opposition of giving in too easily by allowing termination of internet access for persistent infringement to stay in the Copyright Act, even though it will not be brought into effect immediately.

Many say copyright breach by file-sharing happens largely because the works concerned are unavailable in New Zealand by legal means. More items made available through paid download services such as iTunes would stop a significant proportion of attempts to obtain the material illegally, they say.

A group of commentators, including Labour ICT spokesperson Clare Curran, are toying with the idea of persuading vendors such as Google and Microsoft to band together so the business model of online music provision can be brought into the 21st century.

Twitter still carries a scattering of avatars blacked out as a protest against the passage of the law and there are nervous forebodings about what US interests might seek to include in TPPA.

A leaked draft of the US position on the IP section of TPPA is too extreme to be a serious proposal towards a final position, says IP lawyer Rick Shera on the Public Address blog. "Positions as extreme as the latest US IP chapter surely cannot be anything other than blatant negotiation bullying," he writes.