Copyright issues, the new NZ law and our forums

[Menolly]

As most of you will now be aware, there is a new copyright infringement law in place in NZ which includes the powers to suspend people's accounts. This new law covers how it can go about warning people and giving infringement notices etc.

This law also applies to websites and forums, such as our site. And as we are a public forum anyone can look at the content of our forums.

I would like to highlight this new law in relation to us and how any discussions on our forums about illegal copies of material could give our website host these such infringement notices which could shut us and his internet down.

Please bare this in mind from now on when posting things.

[wouster7]

Just a quote from a general manager I was talking to, of a large company in the Hobby...

"GW will spare no expense to chase down anybody who infringes on their trademarked goods..."

The hobby isn't the Internet and anybody affecting their income could potentially impact on their business net. I've seen them go take small hobbyists to court and it would have cost them a lot more in legal proceedings than the scale of things. Nice and easy for us to use a bit of common sense and just avoid posting asking for or participating on anything that could impact on the clubs forum.

As long as we do not provide links to pirated material or assist people in obtaining this material there won't be a problem. So I guess discussions on asking to trade this sort of thing should stop to be on the safe side.

+1

[nik_]

Xnet was voluntarily enforcing something similar for a while there - I got a warning email, and when I didn't respond to it (it was sent to my ISP email account, which I never check) my internet was turned off. I had to call and receive a lecture to get it turned on again.
The file I was downloading was a crack/nocd file, which according to my friends in the know is perfectly legal in NZ but illegal in the US where they consider code that removes DRM etc to be piracy, so the US based company that contacted Xnet was perhaps not within their rights anyway.

*Offtopic* Lazarus - no matter how you find and download the pirated material, it's still pirated material, and it is still possible to track that you are doing it (in the general case, you could go to really extreme measures to avoid it if you knew what you were doing). An alternative would be to stop stealing. A novel idea I know ...

[Vent]

At the end of the day guys and gals the new internet law, and its effectiveness, is of secondary concern to how we, the City Guard gaming club, are perceived.

This forum is our public face. It is the first point of contact for many potential members, and one of the most used methods of communication between club members wishing to share ideas and book games with each other. Facebook has taught us that what we post on the internet has the potential to come back and haunt us down the road. It is a place on which we are judged, whether rightly or wrongly, and as such, I feel, we should strive to act in a manner which places the club in the best light possible.

Asking for, or making available to download, material which is copyrighted under the law is not something that should happen on our public forum, and it is not something we should support.