There was a sudden flutter of excitement last Friday when JezBrown tweeted that a New Zealand school had received a notice under the amendments to the 1994 Copyright Act (Infringing File Sharing Amendment Act). The national Business Review picked up the story and ran this article with some comment from us. Nothing particulary surprising here. The amendments to the copyright laws introduced on 1st September have not been well recieved by many. There are lots of very vocal opponents to this change, who feel that it stamps on some of the very basic rights that exist on the internet.

In the NBR article I was asked about a “deal” that NetSafe has with RIANZ to act as an  intermediary between schools and the rights holders. NetSafe has an agreement with RIANZ (Recording Industry Association of New Zealand) that allows us to act on behalf of schools (should the school so wish) in order to try and establish how these infringements have occured, and how the situation can be resolved.

It seems that this has caused some concern, with one tweeter (eey0re) accusing NetSafe of being “morally incoherent”. I was a little taken aback by this so thought I should lay out what is involved and try to explain why we did what we did.

For us this isn’t an issue of morality. NetSafe isn’t an organisation built around moral values. I’m not suggesting we are amoral either, but NetSafe exists to build capability in New Zealanders online, creating confident and capable internet users. Part of this means that we ensure that New Zealanders are aware of and are able to act within the law as it stands. That’s part of being a successful Digital Citizen.

The introduction on September 1st of the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act changed the copyright landscape for New Zealand significantly. The law states that it

provides rights owners with a special regime for taking enforcement action against people who infringe copyright through file sharing

The first time that they have been able to take action without the use of the court system. The action thay can take is to record an IP address that they believe to have infringed their copyright, contact the ISP that owns it, and instruct them to send a notice to the account holder.

It was obvious to us that somewhere in this change that schools were going to find themselves in the middle of a situation that they felt was somewhat unfair. Since part of what we do as an organisation is to provide support for New Zealand schools in matters of cyber safety and cyber security this meant that we would be dealing with schools as the notices arrived on their doorsteps.

We approached the rights holders groups to see if we could provide some room for schools to deal with infringements happening on their networks. The results of the discussions that we had is the agreement that we have with RIANZ, and an on-going dialogue with NZFACT.

No one is pushing any moral boundaries here. We are an organisation that has a contractual arrangement with the Ministry of Education to provide a service to schools. This agreement is part of that contract. Its contents aren’t any secret.

If a school contacts NetSafe and ask us to work on their behalf then we will contact RIANZ, inform them that they have sent a notice to a school, ask them to suspend that notice for a period of 8 weeks while we work with the school to look at how this breach of the law occured on their network. No judgements, no admission of guilt, no apologies, no propaganda. Schools do not give up their rights under the law by taking advantage of this agreement and no school has to work with us. The school remains in control of the process, we are simply there to assist if required.

To me this isn’t incoherent, morally or otherwise. Just a pragmatic solution for schools to a very real concern expressed by many school boards and leadership teams all across New Zealand.