While we neither endorse nor encourage breaches of copyright, nor do we view them as the looming atrocities some governments would have you fear. The same mindset that vilified the printing press, audio cassettes and CD-Rs has struggled to embrace the internet, particularly when it comes to the ease of sharing information.
Thanks to large corporate interests, copyright violations have been disproportionately elevated above more tangible crimes in recent years, with sweeping international agreements to crack down on digital theft. New Zealand is about to implement our own “three-strike” policy, which requires only an accusation of theft, leaving the burden of proof on the accused.
There are several problems with this approach, which would have been unthinkable in the years before “terrorism” offered a catch-all excuse to sidestep due process in a web of tenuously related crimes.
Leaving aside the implications for human rights, which are self-evident, recent events in Ireland embody the pragmatic fears of those who opposed the legislation: mistakes are easy when internet service providers are shoehorned into filling law enforcement shoes, with equipment, procedures and accountability not designed for that purpose.
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number9.12/irish-dpa-investigates-three-strikes
Innocent people have now been accidentally accused once, and the error was likely discovered only due to the scale of the accusations. We can expect no less when the NZ law comes into effect, and, as Geekzone’s Juha Saarinen put it, “This is an excellent reminder and warning that presumed guilty upon accusation laws are not fair.”
