New Zealand Law To Shut Down Music Blogging
Mark Turner of lo-fi indie pop band Little Pictures sent out an e-mail of kiwi lawmakers’ passing an act in which will affect music blogging and the indie bands in New Zealand on February 28th. The amendment to the copyright act: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.
What does this mean? ISPs have to create a terms of service in which they ultimately are forced to terminate your service being a “repeat infringer”. They can do this without a trial. A repeat infringer is very open to interpretation is it someone who does it twice? The RIAA backs this law. The RIAA can also lick my nuts.
The real problem with enforcing people to not “copyright infringe” e.g. steal from their made up bullshit numbers of lost revenue is the shooting down of people who actually don’t copyright infringe and hurting them. They did this with Blogger. Blogger deleted posts, without warning to bloggers who had been using the service to write music posts. The problem? They had written permission to use the material and got punished anyway.
One of the problems is what if a person uploads their own songs? Well they would be on a list of “restricted acts”. And therefore would have their internet connection disconnected for helping themselves.
Copyright infringing protection is impractical and all it does it hold back the music industry (the mainstream is losing a grip though and they are fighting for this dumb law as a way of trying to hold on.
If you’re a follower of this blog, or are even like reading blogs/music blogs and other content on the internet then go here and sign it even if you’re not from New Zealand (which we’re not). But it’s the internet, I’m not going to sit here and watch other countries follow suit, they have to be let known that this law is total BS. Or else great sites like Einstein Music Journal (their post on the matter)will cease to exist.
Tags: news
Hey thanks Allan, we really appreciate you doing this.