Coleman Jonathan: Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Coleman Jonathan: Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (National—Northcote) 
: 
 I will take a relatively short call on Part 2 of the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill but first I will just follow up on what Dr Worth was saying. He was saying that should there be a change of Government—which of course there will be—we will have to revisit this legislation. Then the Hon Mark Burton said that the legislation would be revisited but gave a different set of reasons. I think that both had some elements of truth in what they were saying in that the pace of technological change will really mean that copyright legislation—anything pertaining to the digital world—will have to be revisited on a pretty regular basis. Within a few short years a lot of this stuff—if it is not obsolete—certainly will not be up to date with current technological developments. 
In the debate on Part 1 we talked about the issue of content shifting with regard to music. But the reality is that those issues now equally pertain to content shifting with regard to video. If one looks out there one sees that there is a whole generation of people who are now watching their television very much along the lines of the iPod model. They are using programs such as LimeWire to download the latest television shows from America to watch programmes such as  
Desperate Housewives 
 or  
Lost 
 and watch them on demand when they want to watch them and where they want to watch them. So the old model of broadcasting really is in its last days. It will not be long—it will be a matter of a couple of short years—before we are going to have Internet television widespread throughout New Zealand. What we need now is a broadband infrastructure that allows that to be provided. This bill really should have given an opportunity to future-proof some of the legislation in anticipation of some of the technological changes that we will see. So I would have to say unfortunately that a lot of this stuff is almost on the verge of becoming obsolete now. 
Speaking about another thing I was at a public meeting last night in my electorate in Glenfield and we were discussing the council district annual plan. There was a guy there with a hand-held video camera who was videoing the whole procedures. Fortunately I was not speaking because when people nowadays have a video on one one wonders what is coming next. But I can tell members that if that video went on YouTube last night I do not think there would have been too many hits on it—it was pretty dry stuff. It was talking about waste sewerage systems through North Shore City. I went up to this guy and said to him: “What are you doing?”. He said: “Look I can’t speak now; I’m actually making a movie.” I do not know how this stuff will appear but I suspect this gentleman was probably making some sort of documentary on local government. It will have been made with a hand-held camera and I would say that it will be on YouTube pretty soon. When we look at clause 77 “New section 172 substituted” we see that it talks about infringement by use of illicit recording made without a performer’s consent. This is obviously covering commercial performance but the point I would make—and I think we are all probably going to face it in this election campaign—is that we are in an environment now where whatever we do or say is on video potentially. It could be on YouTube and basically there could be a need for legislation in the future to give guidance in some of these circumstances. The general point is that a lot of this stuff could be obsolete in a very short time or at the very least we would need further legislation. 
Another point is that we have been talking about technological protection measures. That is a measure that obviously needs to be in the bill. Talking about content shifting from musical formats it will be interesting to see whether manufacturers start building technological protection measures into commercially sold CDs and then what the implications will be for people who try to override those and shift content from their CD player on to their iPod. I am saying that there will constantly be evolving technological developments that will throw up new situations that I think will need to be addressed by this Parliament. It is certainly the area of digital technology and copyright law that I believe will keep this Parliament the officials and certainly anyone involved in those industries intellectually and practically engaged for quite some time. So there may well have been a reason for these Supplementary Order Papers arriving early this morning but it is a shame that they did. I think we will see a lot more change in this area of law over the years to come.