NZ National Party just twittered a new press release on clamping down on red tape. Here is my reply asking that the Copyright Amendment Act be included in the review as it is going to impose significant compliance costs on businesses that provide no benefit other than to copyright holders.
To the Honorable Mr Hide:
I urgently request that you add the compliance costs for businesses associated with Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act to the list that require review. The current reprieve until later this month does not suggest that any changes will occur in the compliance costs associated with this Act.
The draft TCF Code does nothing to deal with the fact that businesses will still effectively be an ISP as defined in the Act. This will include compliance costs associated with implementing stricter firewall rules (e.g. to ensure that employees are unable to use peer-to-peer software), and require expensive tracking software to log all employee activity on the business internet connection (accurate auditing will be required to either identify an offending employee, or to prove to the upstream ISP that no offence was committed).
If it were not for the Copyright Amendment Act, these measures would not need to be implemented. As it stands, every small business in New Zealand is going to be stuck with potential compliance costs in the thousands of dollars just to upgrade their organisations firewall to comply with the Act.
To paraphrase the press release – “Businesses want to get on with productive activity without being hindered by silly rules imposed by inappropriate regulation such as the Copyright Amendment Act”.
During a recession such as this now is not the time to be forcing small businesses to waste time and potentially thousands of dollars in implementing measures to protect their organisation against poorly drafted legislation. Times are such that small businesses have better uses of their money.
Kind regards,
Gavin Treadgold
Section 92 exposes businesses to a significant risk as more businesses have come to rely on their Internet connection. Either spend thousands to tighten up your organisation’s firewall and policies and mitigate some of the potential downtime if your organisation is identified as a copyright infringer; or don’t comply, and when your organisation is identified as an infringer because of the possible actions of one of your employees – and you won’t have the system in place to identify and defend your employee in case they have been falsely accused.
Should businesses be forced to spend little spare money on a compliance cost that is only going to have a detrimental affect on cashflow during a recession? No.
Whilst I respect and support copyright holders (I’m one myself as a photographer and maybe soon an open source programmer) – businesses should not have to incur expenses because the entertainment industry wants them to become their copyright policeman.
