Siva Vaidhyanathan is an interesting and thoughtful scholar who often writes on copyright issues affecting higher education. His recent article summarising the outcome of legal battles between US Author's groups and Universities is an useful summary of the complex issues facing modern institutions attempting to comply with copyright law. At heart is the desperate attempts of the traditional, and increasingly irrelevant, publishing industry to somehow protect various distribution arrangements in the face of overwhelming evidence their time has past.

A moral panic is a type of mob hysteria that generates witch burning and idiotic laws banning paople from access to the Internet. Unless you buy into some serious conspiracy theories about organised religion, at least the witch burners have more basic integrity than the media distribution companies. France has recently made the serious error of trying to save a doomed industry's business model, the UK and New Zealand seem to be teetering on the edge of the same fatal mistake. Cory Doctorow, no friend of copyright maximisers, has just published his response to the UK Mandelson proposal in the Times, we in New Zealand need to be rehearsing these same arguments to get out politicians to listen to New Zealanders, not Sony, Viacom and others desperate to save their outdated businesses.

One of the (pleasant) pecularities of employment as an Academic is the freedom to set my own research agenda and how and where I seek funds and publish the outcomes of my work. This freedom is fundamental to academic work and is consistent with the legislative expectation that universities "develop intellectual independence", employ people "who are active in advancing knowledge" and act as "critic and conscience of society (Education Act 1989, section 162(4)). A further freedom enjoyed by many (but not all) academics is that I own some (but also not all) of my intellectual property - something that may be changing significantly if recent Australian developments are followed through locally.

George Santayana's quote 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' is familiar to many, as in the tale of Cassandra, princess of Troy, and doomed to foretell the future and never be believed. Recent events affecting Kindle owners make me think that Richard Stallman and Clifford Lynch must be feeling increasingly like Cassandra.

Section 92A of the New Zealand Copyright Act has been in the media quite a lot recently, the work of the Creative Freedom Foundation has been excellent in promoting the concerns of a wide range of New Zealanders over the serious risks to personal freedoms and citizenship reflected in this badly written and sycophantic legislation. Some day I very much hope that some sunshine will fall on why the previous Minister Judith Tizard saw fit to ignore the recommendation of the Commerce Select Committee and reinsert an obviously broken and excessive piece of law. The idea that a Minister of the Crown thinks that "deliberately vague" law is in the interests of New Zealand speaks volumes in itself. Three areas, however, don't seem to have been addressed at much depth. These include the risk to modern citizenship reflected in this law, and the real risk to schools, universities, and other educational institutions.

Nothing lasts forever - and Variety are drawing our attention once again to the fact that this is more true now than ever. They're talking about movies, a colleague at VUW is concerned about multimedia and I keep thinking about all that teaching and research data my colleagues keep on hard drives and CDs in the belief that they have permanently stored it.

Today was the day I finally got to speak to the submission on the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill before the Commerce Select Committee.

Hopefully those of you in Auckland are attending the InternetNZ workshop on the BIll. The Wellington one went well, although there was a certain sense of preaching to the converted - there was very little evidence of content providers defending the line being followed by the Minstry of Economic Development policy analysts.

Finally we have some movement on the revision of New Zealand's copyright laws with the arrival in the house of the "Copyright (New Technololgies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill."

The time taken to revise laws means we're not going to get another chance to improve our copyright law here in New Zealand any time soon so its important that any changes position New Zealanders strongly.

If anything is certain, it is that new technologies are going to continue to challenge our understanding of content and the existing distribution channels are going to fight to retain the status quo as much as possible, so we, as consumers and voters need to be ready to fight back.

One of the more important paragraphs in the preamble to the Bill is this one:

"[permitted acts] are provided where activity is seen as having particular social value or in circumstances where enforcement of rights would be impractical and undesirable. New Zealand is also a party to a range of international intellectial property agreements, most notably the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights [TRIPS], which place limits on the extent to which exceptions can be made to the exclusive rights."

The importance of this is as a guide to the thinking and motivation of the people who actually wrote this Bill (most certainly not the sponsor Judith Tizard) as well as the significant constraint they are placed in by TRIPS.