Curran Clare: Copyright (Parallel Importing of Films) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Copyright (Parallel Importing of Films) Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:13877. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Labour members have made it very clear in our speeches on this bill the Copyright (Parallel Importing of Films) Amendment Bill that we are reluctant supporters of this measure. We have qualified support for the 5-month delay which rests purely on the impact of parallel importing on provincial and rural cinemas which have less capacity to show multiple high-grossing movies simultaneously and less flexibility and ability to cut costs to remain competitive. We believe that the industry should have changed by now and should have caught upwith new technology but we do acknowledge that those cinemas that are in New Zealand’s provincial and rural communities are important and that the Government and Parliament should support their role. That is really the only reason we have for supporting this bill and we certainly have made it—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.CLARE CURRAN: Where I was at was making it very clear that Labour’s support for this bill is very conditional. Our reasoning was purely around the qualified support for the 5-month delay in parallel importing which rested on the impact on provincial and rural cinemas. We have made it very clear that we will not support another go by this industry coming before a select committee to ask for another extension on parallel importing. I am very keen to ensure that that is reinforced from the other side of the House as this bill has come out of the Commerce Committee.What lies behind this bill is a much bigger issue. It is an issue about our copyright regime in New Zealand and an issue around intellectual property. Unfortunately this bill could not be considered within the context of that wider discussion as it should have been because the Government has reneged on a commitment it made to undertake a wide-ranging review of the copyright regime in 2013. Instead it has put that on hold. As we now know the reason for that is the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations—that has been revealed and it has been acknowledged by the Minister of Commerce under questioning. So I want to talk a little bit about that because where this bill should have sat around parallel importing generally should have been within the context of a wider review.There are a number of concerns that Labour has around the intellectual property provisions that are potentially in Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations which as yet we do not know the detail of because the Government has not been transparent about discussing that with other parties and with the public of New Zealand in general. You do not have to release the text in order to have the discussion and unfortunately we are not able to have the discussion and all we can do is suppose based on earlier leaked versions of that text. One of our concerns is that there may be being proposed in those negotiations an increased regime of parallel importing generally. What we want to do is make sure that that does not happen that there is a commitment from the other side of the House to back up the discussions and the outcome of the select committee process and that that is not what is being planned.I want to touch on a few of the other potential things that may be around in that copyright regime in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and one of them is the potential extension of the duration of copyright by 20 years to 70 years—70 years; yes that is right—depending on the type of work and the date it was published. It has also 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 which would pull New Zealand into line with the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act which we would see as being a backward step rather than a forward step in terms of promoting innovation in New Zealand.We may also be seeing a new criminal offence for the act of circumventing a technological protection measure or a digital lock which means that people who have legitimately bought DVDs in other countries and brought them back to New Zealand and are unable to watch them because they have been locked into that region are not able to find ways to be able to watch them which they can do. There could bestrengthened laws in that area that would ultimately disadvantage consumers in New Zealand.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 copyrighted works as part of the normal technological processes. All these issues are very important. They actually do impinge on the ability of artists to go about their work especially in an online environment. But it is also the impact on innovation and our ability to control our own intellectual property regime that is extremely important.Our concern is that we are not going to see an aggressive and heavy-handed copyright regime in New Zealand. It is extremely important that we have a balanced and wide-ranging discussion as a community rather than having those things imposed on us which is why the transparency around the negotiations in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations is so important—so that the community can have that discussion and so that there can be discussions in the political environment around what is actually being proposed rather than supposition. This has the potential to harm the way that New Zealand artists and innovative companies work and operate and use the internet to connect with overseas markets. The extension of a copyright duration internet termination as a penalty making it illegal to bypass technological protection measures as I said and restricting parallel imports into other areas so that New Zealanders would lose access to many overseas works and be forced to pay more potentially for books CDs and DVDs than the rest of the world would actually be a backward step. It would be clearly a backward step for us. The most important thing is for us to be able to have the discussion about it.We believe that excessive copyright durations could also potentially affect libraries from making backups and format-shifting works which could result in a tangible loss of shared heritage. So I think you might see that although Labour has very qualified support for this bill which gives an extra 3 years for very limited amounts of parallel importing for this particular issue this has to be the end of it. We have to be able to move forward. We have to be able to promote innovation and an online environment generally that is a progressive environment for copyright and for having that discussion in New Zealand because if we do not we are simply going to be going backwards.