Curran Clare: Copyright (Parallel Importing of Films) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Copyright (Parallel Importing of Films) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11463. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South):This Copyright (Parallel Importing of Films) Amendment Bill aims to provide a window and one would hope that it is a window to the future and not to the past. Unfortunately there is some doubt as to whether that is the case but I want to talk about what the future could be and should be and where copyright does fit in.This bill provides a provision for an industry to adapt and I would argue that that adaptation should be happening faster than it currently is at this point. It is important that we allow our industries to adapt because our film industry in New Zealand is critical to our own economy. However this bill is not actually about our film industry in our economy; it is ultimately about the film industry in other economies. The reason for this bill is to take account of that need to adapt the need for it to have an expiry date until 2016 and to shorten that period where parallel imports are allowed to 5 months rather than 9 months which we support. But we do say and it is important to say this very firmly in this House that the world has moved on. I just want to quickly bring the House up to date as to why this bill is necessary and why it is necessary that we move on as a Parliament in considering copyright generally in our country.Before the widespread use of the digital exhibition technology as it is called the release of films in New Zealand was often delayed because of the limited availability of the cheaper second-hand film prints and the distributors that waited to see whether films were successful in overseas markets before bringing them to New Zealand. The ban was intended to give sufficient time for cinemas to screen films without the competition from DVDs and therefore to increase cinema and distributor revenue. Increased revenue of course enabled distributors to reinvest more into bringing films to New Zealand which provided consumers with greater access to a wide variety of films. As we know the internet has changed all of that.This ban was always intended to be a temporary measure. It was always going to be a temporary measure to allow the film industry to adapt. The ban was introduced in 2003 for a period of 5 years to give cinemas enough time to transition to digital exhibition technology. In 2008 that ban was extended for another 5 years which we are now up to because cinemas had not fully transitioned. Well they still have not transitioned so they are being given another 3 years to do that. Yes it is important but there are a couple of things to note. The first is that cinemas throughout the world and in New Zealand are not in decline. The number of cinema businesses has risen from 66 in 2005 to 87 in 2012 suggesting that the industry has financial flexibility to invest in new cinemas. Digital technology has enabled cinemas to screen films closer to first market cinematic release dates. About a third of films are now released in New Zealand within 1 month of the first market release date around 57 percent of cinemas have now converted to digital exhibition technology and it is expected—as we should expect—that 100 percent will convert within the next 2 years.This year 2013 was supposed to be the date that a copyright review would occur in New Zealand. Labour supported there being a copyright review in New Zealand and in fact our policy supported it. Labour said that we would undertake a full review of the Copyright Act with the aim of introducing a new copyright bill within 18 months that would update and extend the framework for digital copyright in New Zealand. The first phase of that review would have been to commission an independent analysis of the problems within the status quo from an eminent expert such as the review done by the independent UK reportDigital Opportunity  produced by Professor Ian Hargreaves which was created for the UK Government. We would then have undertaken a period of consultation. That was a really important piece of work to undertake and it has not occurred in New Zealand despite the Government actually saying that it would go ahead with that. I would be very interested to know from the Minister of Commerce why that has not occurred and I am sure that we will be trying to tease that out when we get to the select committee process.The US itself is actually undertaking a copyright review right now but there has been a suggestion—and I want to put it on the record in this House—that the copyright review that was agreed to by this Government has been suspended on account of New Zealand’s ongoing negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The United States has reportedly tabled terms during the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations that if implemented would require amendments to our current law. For example there are some leaked texts that show that New Zealand has been asked to extend the duration of copyright by 20 years to 70 years depending on the type of work and the date that it was published. It has been suggested that this could also result in the expansion of the regulatory regime under which internet service providers must assist rights holders in enforcing copyright online pulling New Zealand closer into line with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We could also see a new criminal offence for the act of circumventing a technological protection measure or a digital lock even in the absence of copyright infringement. Another proposal might require New Zealand to afford rights holders an exclusive right over temporary electronic copies which could mean changing the provisions in our Copyright Act that carve out the liability for transient reproductions of copyright works as part of normal technological processes. These issues are all extremely important. They relate to New Zealand’s intellectual property laws our regime and also our intellectual property itself. We ask why that review is not occurring and why we cannot have a public conversation about these issues especially in light of the US having just announced its own copyright review.I have said in this House many times that we have to get our heads around the internet. The language of copyright policies in many regimes including our own likensa physical copy to a virtual one. This if actually recognised in law would become a problem for internet service providers of all kinds because internet traffic is transmitted from point A to point B by making temporary copies. Strictly applied this right would pretty much make the internet illegal. I think it is really important to have this public discussion in our country and I would like to refer to some of the work that has been done by InternetNZ which has recently said that we must take a principled approach on these issues. We must set down some principles upon which we are going to have this discussion.In the last year—last October—I spent 3 weeks travelling through the United States on a trip devoted to intellectual property. Despite the reality of counterfeiting and fraud in the physical world most of the discussion that I had in that period of time revolved around intellectual property in the digital environment. I would just like to say that the United States measures its intellectual property. Its intellectual property supports at least 40 million jobs and contributes more than US$5 trillion or nearly 35 percent to the United States GDP. I ask why we do not measure our intellectual property. We do not. I have asked the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment whether we do and we do not. We do not get the importance of our intellectual capital to our economic growth—either that or we remain in thrall to our trade partners. Our economic development the growth of our weightless economy depends on this and it is time we grew up.