Ti Point Tork

S92A: Interim Repeat Infringer Termination Policy

The Telecommunications Carriers Forum have released a note to ISPs saying that while they’re working on a policy that will comply with S92A of the Copyright Act (“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”), it’s not clear that the policy will be finished 28 days before the 28 Feb 2009 deadline when the law takes effect. As such, ISPs should formulate their own interim policy, just in case.

TCF had hoped to have the policy out for wide review before Christmas (I’ve seen an early draft, which was good, and made comments) but the note says that it may be “mid- to late-January” before it goes out. This delay isn’t bad news–we got this crappy law because of arrogant buffoons who didn’t run a good consultation. TCF are trying to do it right, so big ups for them. I’ll post here when it goes out.

Ironic aside: I got permission from Rick Shera, the author of the note, to publish it on my blog. However, the PDF is “protected” to the point where I couldn’t copy and paste the quote from the law above–I had to retype it! This is exactly the case that people who hate DRM (which was enshrined in law in the same turd of a bill that gave us a three-strikes law) talk about: software locks preventing fair use, in this case the copying and pasting of NZ law.