Michael Geist

New Zealand passed its digital copyright law this week, drawing the ire of the technology community and the blogosphere.  While the bill isn't great, many of the provisions are far better than what Industry Minister Jim Prentice may have in mind for Canada including format and time shifting provisions as well as anti-circumvention provisions that are more flexible than those found in the DMCA.  In fact, the anti-circumvention provisions are arguably the best of any country, since they are compliant with WIPO, limited in scope, and seek to preserve fair dealing rights.

On the anti-circumvention front, there are several things to note:

• the technological protection measures (TPMs) expressly exclude access controls such as region coding.  In other words, the anti-circumvention provisions do not apply to devices that "only controls access to a work for non-infringing purposes."
• the legislation targets anti-circumvention devices, but excludes those devices that have something more than "limited commercially significant applications" other than circumventing a TPM.
• the law prohibits making, selling, distributing, advertising, or offering a circumvention device if the person "knows or has reason to believe that it will, or is likely to, be used to infringe copyright."  The inclusion of a knowledge requirement creates an additional safeguard against overbroad application of the provision.
• most importantly, the law clearly permits circumvention for "permitted acts", which effectively preserves fair dealing rights (the statute also specifies the right to circumvent for encryption research).  More impressive, the law includes a system to facilitate circumvention for permitted acts in the event that users are unable to circumvent a TPM themselves.  In such cases, the law allows a "qualified person", which includes librarians, archivists, and educational institutions, to circumvent a TPM on behalf of a user (the user can also ask the copyright owner to unlock the work for them).

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