Posts Tagged ‘Vodafone’
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.
About ... Ihug
Ihug is one of most recognisable telecommunication brands in New Zealand, possibly just right after Telecom New Zealand.
About it's service... it is declining, but still good. Its email service went nuts for quite a few times in the past years, but it didn't had any impact on me ... I never use ISP email boxes.
However, we may need to say goodbye to ihug soon. Its owner, Vodafone New Zealand, will shut down the brand and merge the current service to becone part of Vodafone New Zealand around April this year.
I guess this is possibly a good news to current customers like me, except...
I was very happy with ihug's old brandband plan I'm on (2mb plan which gives 4 gb allowance, 2gb for peak time and other 2gb for non-peak time).
I don't need a fast speed so I was reluctant to move to the new 7.5mb plan for quite a long time. And another reason I liked the plan, well, you can see it below:
You can sort of guess out how I did it by just look at this picture, and I can swear to you that except normal log in process, there's absolutely no illegal tools/hackings involved.
But I recently received a pretty and polite (but not nice) letter from ihug - they will switch my broadband to a new plan from March(of course, by force) from March, which I don't want to have.
Without the 'extra' data allowance which Ihug kindly provided to me for the last year or two, Ihug's service is not as competitive as other ISPs like Orcon and TelstraClear.
I'm seriously considering switiching to another ISP, after being a 4 year loyal Ihug customer.
