Posts Tagged ‘Internet’
Section 92a of the copyright act, update
While I was away there were some interesting development on this issue. First the latest response from the parliament, Simon Power, Minister of Commerce:
Yes; I respond by saying that I am mindful of the concerns that have been expressed by the public in relation to this provision coming into force. As the member will be aware, industry representatives are currently working on a code of practice to help implement this law, which was passed by the previous Labour Government.
For me, this means that the government is not going to delay the implementation or abolish 92A, but rather leave the job of fixing problems to the "Code of Practice".
I talked about that "Code of Practice" before, I was quite happy on the draft version but that code is not in concrete yet. It is still open to public submission so to copyright holder submissions as well. This submission is now far more important than blackout your facebook page or write a letter to your local MP. I'm preparing my own submission.
I also checked responses from ISPs, here are the extracts:
There will be a fee for rights holders lodging infringement notices to offset the work that we will have to undertake in order to process the alleged infringement. There will be no additional fees or charges for customers.
I hope Orcon charges them a good price. ISPs shouldn't get abused by copyright terrorists as well. I also think ISPs should cut the internet of any copyright holder who have made 3 false accusations - it's more than fair.
Telecom New Zealand (via twitter):
We recognise the importance of protecting individuals' copyright. However we don't believe #s92 in its current form is the best solution.
I certainly agree, I'm not endorsing piracy, but this society should not giving up its liberty and undermining its justice system to protect the profits of some.
Vodafone didn't got a lot to say, but they already finished the work on the format of infringement notice(PDF).
I'll keep you updated. I can't tell the full effect of s92a at the moment, but believe me, this thing is not going to work -for real and serious infringer, there are plenty of ways to get around this law - I removed the way to get around the S92A here as I realise that I'm attracting real infringers here.
China declares war on "vulgar" websites
For many Chinese websites, 2009 didn't start very well. China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre, a semi-government agency, has published a list of websites which contain "vulgar and unhealthy information" that could be harmful to the country's youth.
The whole list can be found here(in Chinese).
The interesting thing about this list is that it covered majority of the most popular websites in China. Google was ranked number one "vulgar" site, followed by Baidu and Sina. I'm very confident that every Chinese netizen have visited at least one of such vulgar websites, myself included. So after being diagnosed as psychotic under the Chinese guideline because I need to work on my computer for too long, I'm now also officially a vulgar and unhealthy person because I have visited at least 75% of the websites listed.
Most of the Chinese netizens are very familiar with such Internet Cleansing campaign as it was repeated many times in the past decade. Despite that most of the cleansing was justified under the banner of "please think of the children"(which itself is a logical fallacy) ,it's usually the adult internet users who are most affected.
Have these campaigns worked, anyway? Well, the funny thing is, thanks to the new Xinhua Search engine, an official search engine intended to censor vulgar information, if you know the right keyword, you can find as many "vulgar" information as you can expect to find in most commercial websites. I can list you an endless list of examples of vulgar information that can be found on Chinese official news websites like the Xinhua Net: this, this, this ,or this, and the list goes on, and yet they were never criticised by anyone.
It's a common sense that it is impossible to censor out all those "unhealthy" stuffs if somebody really wants to find them, as there is a market for it.
As a regular user of the most vulgar website (Google), I cannot recall not even once that Google returns me "unhealthy" information, unless I deliberately searched for it (I admit it, haha) - not to mention Google has a optional filter that censors images and texts, which is very effective in my opinion. Therefore it is hard for me not jump to the conclusion that the accusation of search engines means that creators of the list, themselves deliberately searched "vulgar" information in order to produce the list.
So now who's unhealthy and vulgar?
In my idea, protect the future generation probably wasn't the original purpose of all those internet cleansing campaigns, and the campaigns themselves, are kind of the ridiculous - find me another country on this planet which labels the absolutely majority of its netizen population as "internet addicted" and "vulgar"?
Most of the Chinese parents, including mine, are not as tech-savvy as their children, some don't even use the internet, TV and newspaper are still their major sources of information, which are still largely controlled by the state. Strangely, they are in fact the targeted audience of such campaign.
So it's not surprising that I have met too many Chinese parents who didn't hesitate to use corporal punishment to their children just because they logged onto the Internet without parents' knowledge, because deeply in their mind, the word "internet" means "evil". Sounds shocking but luckily, as the post 80's generation are gradually becoming parents themselves, use of such corporal punishment are now less common.
However, for the older generation, although their children are now grown up and corporal punishment won't work on them any more, but bear in mind that they are now the most powerful generation in China, in 40-50s(or even older), financially stable; and as they usually have the directorial positions in organisations or their work places, this group is also potentially a powerful political force.
Now the long demonisation of the Internet is starting to make sense to me.
