New Zealand copyright law changes shortsighted says head of Open Source Society

26 January 2009

The New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) believes the upcoming changes to New Zealand copyright law are shortsighted.

“Copyright law underpins all free and open source software (FOSS) licenses” says Society President Don Christie. “It is an enormously important area of law for the FOSS community the Society was established to represent.”

It has been a long held dream to have a second LCA in New Zealand, preferably in my home city, Wellington.

I wrote about this in my newsletter of early 2008.

Let's imagine:

"Rumour has it that this morning's power cut across Wellington was caused be an ARPA notice being issued to the local power supplier. This in response to claims of excessive file sharing and pirating in the Wellington region.

Apparently it was more convenient for ARPA to issue a notice to a single power supplier than have to deal with multiple ISPs. The way the Copyright Act is written the definition of an ISP, hence the notice being issued to Transpower - who provide a key component of internet hosting, electricity.

The New Zealand Computer Society is claiming that the recent legislation that will allow alleged copyright holders to cut off the Internet connections of New Zealand citizens is illogical and ethically flawed. The NZCS says that "Section 92a, championed by previous Associate Arts Minister Hon Judith Tizard, states that Internet Service Providers must look to disconnecting the Internet service of those that have been repeatedly accused of accessing copyrighted material online." The legislation has no requirements for the accusers to furnish evidence of infringement and there are no legal penalties for making false accusations.

ISO have put up a press release here about it. It comes in four parts for a total of 7,228 pages... not your average bedtime reading I would guess... and no, I don't feel like shelling out 342 Swiss Francs (NZ$529) to find out, although I am curious about what format it is supplied in...

Congratulations (again) to Richard Hulse for the work he does at Radio NZ and for getting this project into the GNU GPL domain.

Please do show your support by contributing to this very worthy audio player project.

Continuing in the vein of Open Source in real businesses we have this article from NetworkWorld. Robert Wisemen and Kevin Bomar talk about benefits Sabre Holdings derive from the use of Open Source software in their business. Sabre Holdings provide services to both airlines and travel agents around the world and are truly a 24/7 operation.

Lots of affirmation around bullet points we all know about and they even discuss some of the drawbacks... my favourite comes from page 4...

iTWire is carrying an article on an approach to Open Standards in Europe that it classes as a "must read". The article itself is available here and is being published by the European Journal of ePractice.

It's worth it for the background read and there are lots of links to various bits of research... what is not mentioned on the front page of the website (but is on the pdf) is that the authors work for Oracle and IBM so if you are going to wave it at people be prepared to answer any 'vested interest' counterclaims.

I was collecting emails to try and put together a write up of the talk Lessig gave in Auckland last week. Fortunately Public Address has pulled in Matthew Poole to do this task.

Excellent description here.

There is a lot in the write up of interest, but for me the money quote is this:

According to Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the German Foreign Ministry, Open Source desktops are cheaper to maintain by far than proprietary equivalents. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we invest only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average invest more than 3000 euro per desktop per year," he said.