p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- French president Nicolas Sarkozy is hanging in, determined to meet his obligation to the entertainment cartels to ram home their ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ law.

Under it, “ISPs would become corporate copyright cops, and users identified as file sharers could lose their Internet connections,” said p2pnet yesterday.

Now the New Zealand government, the first administration to officially adopt the ‘law’ and the first to feel the wrath of its citizens as a direct consequence, is also trying to figure out another way to shaft the people who put it into office.

“The National government will freeze any further changes to the Copyright Act with an eye to throwing the whole thing out and rewriting it from scratch,” says National Business Review, going on »»»

Over the last two months the National government has progressively scrapped Labour’s ‘band-aid’ adjustments to the Copyright Act 1994. [ ... 'progressively scrapped,'  eh? Nice one]

Wholesale reform of the Copyright Act was part of the National Party’s election promise, but has since been put on the backburner for the government and “is not considered a priority at this stage”.

The Copyright Act was written in the pre-internet age, and does not address any of the complexities surrounding file sharing, format shifting, and other modern issues such as DVD copying – problems the last government was attempting to fix in a piecemeal fashion.

Any further “band-aid” approaches to the act will not go be going ahead, leaving an uncertain period for the IP industry until Justice minister Simon Power begins the reform process.

As Joho the Blog puts it, “New Zealand has decided that trying to amend copyright for the digital age is like trying to adjust a horse’s carburetor. So, it’s going to start all over again.”

Says Geoff Glass in a comment post »»»

Unfortunately it is not really possible for them to start from scratch. Copyright terms, scope, limits technical measures and so on are specified in treaties, from the Bern Convention to the WIPO treaties. NZ may not have ratified all of them (WIPO?), but they cannot afford to ignore (tremendous) pressure from the U.S., the E.U. and others. As was recently admitted in the case of ACTA (being secretly developed in conjunction with industry), limiting the ability of national governments to choose their own course is one of the purposes of treaties. Here in Canada there are reports the U.S. has told our government that if we want to work on trade across the border, we need to implement our own DMCA.

Says Crosbie Fitch »»»

I’m with Ripley:

Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire copyright act from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Hudson: Fuckin’ A…
Burke: Ho-ho-hold on, hold on one second. This legislation has a substantial dollar value attached to it.
Ripley: They can *bill* me.

Abolish copyright. You know it makes sense.

But, “I daresay NZ won’t take this advice and will simply replace the deckchairs with plastic versions that are more resilient to subzero seawater,” he adds.

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p2pnet – France re-boots ‘3 strikes’ bill, April 29, 2009
National Business Review – Entire Copyright Act to be scrapped, May 1, 2009
Joho the Blog – New Zealand starts copyright from scratch, April 30, 2009