Curran Clare: Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Curran Clare: Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
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CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on the third reading of the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill. Again I place on the record my thanks to the officials for the hard work that they have done during the passage of this bill. It has been a very complex bill. I think my colleague Jacinda Ardern described it as fraught. I have found it to be quite exciting and challenging because ultimately I think it is about the future. The underlying issues are about the future and about how we use the Internet. This bill has enabled us as a Parliament to start thinking about that matter and about addressing some of those issues. 
I will also place on record my thanks to the Commerce Committee—its chair Lianne Dalziel and the other members of the committee; all of them. It was an interesting and generally quite constructive experience to engage with the Minister of Commerce Simon Power on this issue and certainly to engage with the industry. To all of those people who are out there listening—I know that many hundreds perhaps thousands of people are watching this parliamentary debate at the moment because I know how deeply they feel about this issue—I say that Labour supports this bill and that it supports it on the basis that there has been a negotiated solution which is that although the suspension of Internet accounts remains in this bill it is not enacted. That is the only basis on which we could support the bill. 
Labour fundamentally believes that New Zealanders have the right to access the Internet and that all New Zealanders should be able to access the Internet. We are fundamentally opposed to Internet disconnection and I cannot say it any more plainly than that. This compromise means that the suspension of Internet access as the ultimate penalty for repeat copyright infringement remains in the bill but it cannot be enacted unless the Minister makes the decision to do so. The Minister making the decision would have to do so on the basis of there being a case put clearly by the rights-holders in order to prove the damage being done to the industry and it is our opinion that such a case cannot be made in this current environment. As members know Labour’s preferred option was to completely omit account suspension but National’s position was intractable. Again I will also put on record particularly for the benefit of the Green members in this House that Labour has been transparent and open about all of those matters right from the very beginning. 
Having addressed that matter I will say a few things about the debate that we have had tonight because the debate has gone in a number of interesting directions. A number of matters were not discussed unfortunately and one of them is the costs although I must correct myself and say that one member opposite did raise that issue. I would have liked to go into that issue a little bit more as it goes to the regulations and to how this bill will act in practice including what those costs will entail and who will end up paying them in order to make this regime work. 
There were a number of extremely interesting submissions on this matter and a number of estimations were made on the actual cost of producing a notice that would go to a person using the Internet who was alleged to have infringed. The cost of processing and sending a notice was estimated by one of the Internet service providers as I think somewhere between $1 and $28 per notice. This issue needs to be continued to be examined in terms of how many notices will actually be put out there what the costs are and who ends up paying for that. A number of other issues need to be addressed as well. 
This debate is a positive thing in some ways but one of the things that this debate has done is to put firmly on the agenda the thorny and frightening issue of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. It has been described as a trade agreement but it is fast becoming something much more than that and goes to the heart of issues of sovereignty. A number of speakers in the House tonight have talked about that. To quickly recap I mentioned the fact that while this bill is passing through the House New Zealand might have the ability to put in place its own copyright regime only to be overtaken by something much much bigger and much more frightening in terms of our intellectual property rights and our ability to manage our creative content. Essentially that could be overtaken by this bill. 
Labour has made statements on this matter. We have asked for more transparency and for a broadened dialogue and we have asked the Government to make a commitment to that. So far tonight despite repeated calls there has been no sense of that commitment coming from the other side of the House. That is a great disappointment. 
I go back to the core parts of this bill. This bill will establish a regime that deters file sharing that infringes copyright. It is hoped by many in this Chamber and indeed I think by all of us across this Chamber that the intent of this bill will largely be served by the educational role of the notice and notice regime that the point at which an alleged infringer is taken to a tribunal will be minimal and that essentially if people are infringing copyright and do not know that what they are doing is illegal which is what much of the research shows then they will cease that behaviour once they have received the first notice or the second notice. That is essentially what we hope will happen. But as in every regime around the world that is dealing with these issues at the moment there is still no real conclusive evidence on that. We are lucky in a sense in New Zealand that we are tonight putting through this House legislation that does not include that Draconian measure of suspension and termination which has turned so many other environments in the international area on their heads and created a flashpoint for protest. As I mentioned in my second reading speech in the UK there is a High Court case a judicial review happening as we speak on their legislation because it includes termination. 
In conclusion I say that Labour supports this bill. We support it with reservations. We believe there are some much bigger issues to deal with on this issue. We look forward to providing substantive policy in this area.