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Copyright update due this afternoon

Some indication as to where New Zealand copyright law is headed should arrive this afternoon.

More information on the replacement for the temporarily suspended Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act is due to be released to an eager audience of internet users, civil rights advocates, musicians and recording companies.

Under the initial provisions of S92, anyone merely accused of infringing copyright would be given three warnings then, summarily, have their internet access revoked.

A number of options to this have been mooted and, sometime today, we ought to know which of these the government has opted to follow.

The most likely solution is the creation of a tribunal who will be responsible for vetting complaints by copyright holders before any warnings or sanctions are issued.

While this may seem like "a good idea", I have a feeling that the overhead in terms of time and cost might well be horrendous -- and who pays?

What's more, history has taught us that the last thing we need is another quasi-legal body charged with the job of trying to convert bad law in to good practice.

If the tribunal option is taken, I can see huge backlogs of cases piling up in front of it, resulting in massive delays -- and as they say "justice delayed is justice denied", for all parties.

One must also wonder what thresholds for proof such a tribunal will require from the copyright holders and what level of defense the accused will be allowed to present.

Will this turn into a sharkfest, with lawyers from all sides driving their BMW and Porsche dealers in to fits of ecstasy with all the extra sales that result?

Or will it be a far more informal arrangement, where lawyers (and perhaps even advocates) are prohibited and it becomes a "one-on-one" with accused individuals and copyright-holders being required to present their own arguments with strictly limited time and budgetary constraints?

But you've got to ask yourself -- what's the point?

Why on earth are we out there passing laws to protect buggy-whip manufacturers in this age of the automobile?

Surely, such backwards-looking legislation is doing little more but hindering progress and innovation in the area of marketing intellectual property in a way that suits the demands of the consumer.

Those who argue the loudest that they're being killed by online freeloaders that steal their material by way of illegal downloads seem to be doing "very nicely thank you", despite this alleged crippling insult to their business.

And, as I've said several times before -- what's the point in trying to crack down on those who might download a new pop-music track via P2P when the same material is made freely available on YouTube where you can get browser plug-ins that will dump it on your hard-drive in MP4 format with sparkling quality?

Or you can get yourself a nice little USB satellite receiver that lets you capture all the latest music/movies broadcast on FreeView and pop them into hi-quality audio or video files on your PC. What's more, there's just no way for the recording/movie companies to even know you're doing this.

Trying to penalise people for using the internet to do what has become a widely accepted (if not legal) practice is futile. The real hard-core downloaders will simply capture stuff from TV transmissions or form their own little networks where they exchange stuff online well under the radar of the copyright owners.

As I've said many, many times before (oops -- broken record alert) the *real* answer is for someone to come along and set up an online content agency where, for a small monthly fee, you get unfettered access to a huge range of copyrighted material. Kind of a pay-TV for the internet.

I'd gladly pay that extra $10 a month if it gave me free access to a library of music and video content. Even Murdoch could get in on the act by effectively making his stable of media publications available through such an outlet. I'd wager that this is the only way he'll ever be able to leverage a paywall to get extra revenue from his content.

It's far better to get 1 cent a month from every internet account in the country than to try and convince 0.1% of them to pay $10/month for your content.

If I had the money and had to choose just a single opportunity to devote my time and capital to, creating an online mega-media syndication/subscription service would be what I'd be doing right now. I can guarantee you that within 5 years, this will be the way premium content is acquired and whoever sets up the infrastructure first and signs up the content will become the richest person on the planet.

It's a shame (for him) that Murdoch doesn't spot this opportunity.

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