The New Zealand government has reintroduced a newly rewritten addition to the Copyright Act which will allow rights’ holders to send copyright notices to ISPs, and force them to pass them on to account holders. Section 92A of the Copyright Act will allow rights holders to take people who have been identified as infringers more than three times in front of a Copyright Tribunal. This law will allow the Copyright Tribunal to hand down either a $15,000 fine or six months internet disconnection. The law specifies that the account holder himself is responsible for what is downloaded via the account, and doesn’t make allowances for identifying the actual copyright infringer if there are multiple computers tied to an account — via Slashdot

Given the recent coverage and controversy over Australia’s forthcoming web censorship system, it is somewhat surprising (and worrying) that Clause 11 of the UK’s proposed Digital Economy Bill seems to have gone by largely unnoticed. It amends the Communications Act 2003 to insert a new section 124H that could give the Secretary of State powers to order ISPs to block pretty much any website for pretty much any reason. Such orders would not require the scrutiny of parliament, or anyone else for that matter, because the Secretary of State would not be required to publish them — via Slashdot

One of Australia’s top communications experts says the Government’s internet censorship trials were designed to succeed from the outset, presented no new information and are now being used by the Government to further its political agenda. His comments came after Communications Minister Stephen Conroy yesterday announced he would introduce legislation before next year’s elections forcing ISPs to block a secret blacklist of refused classification (RC) websites for all Australian internet users. Separately, a report into the scope of content that will be caught up in the net filters concluded that the Government’s policy might lead to a wide range of innocuous material disappearing from Australians’ computer screens. Commentators in Australia and overseas have interpreted Senator Conroy’s policy as pushing the country towards being like repressive regimes such as China and Iran. University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the Government had still failed to address serious issues such as whether the internet filtering scheme would result in any meaningful reduction in harmful content and whether it was worth the effort, given the risk that the scope of blocked content could widen significantly

Australia’s lack of constitutionally guaranteed rights made a much higher level of censorship possible in Australia than in other democracies, constitutional law expert Professor George Williams said today. Australia does not have a Bill of Rights which protects free speech at a federal level, said Williams, the Anthony Mason Professor of law at the University of New South Wales. We don’t have the protections that they have in every other democratic country. That means Australia might be subject to far more stringent regulations on the internet than would be possible in other democratic countries

Civil rights and online free speech lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today criticised the government’s internet filtering report, claiming civil rights implications should be the focus rather than the technology’s impacts on internet speed and performance