Blacked Out and Blue Is What New Zealand Is Trying To Make You
If you’re on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, or any number of other social networks and have all of a sudden happened upon some profiles with blank black avatars, profile pics, etc., you’re experiencing a very minor version of what New Zealand plans to do to your internets. Yes, apparently a New Zealand law coming into effect in less than 2 weeks plans to haphazardly go full steam ahead after their citizens, (supposed) perpetrators of copyright infringement who may do something as simple as copy a fully owned music file from their computer to their MP3 player to trigger the response of – TURNING OFF THEIR INTERNET! They’re ineffectively trying to do ACTION profiling, assuming that because you’re doing C (which is not a crime nor even morally wrong in any sense), you must have been guilty of doing A and B too, and before doing any kind of actual investigating, charging, or even letting you know they’re going to do anything at all, BOOM – you’ve been blacked out.
Oh yea, and if you’re in a company, library, or other shared connection, guess what? Joe Blo down the hall downloading a song from his computer to mp3 player can get the connection for your whole establishment turned off! Because if my neighbor blows his nose, I stole copyrighted material. But hey, that’s what government is turning into – New Zealand is merely doing it egregiously in this case, but we’ve been losing our personal freedoms and privacies left and right in our own countries over the last decade and most of us are completely oblivious to it.
Bottom line, this law sucks, it’s completely unfair, should never even be remotely considered for a law ANYWHERE let alone in a civilized place like New Zealand, and you better believe that record and motion picture companies are drooling over the thought of duplicating this law to a country near you, maybe even your own. What the individuals you’ve run across on these social networking sites are doing is showing a mini-preview of what New Zealand is planning to do, in order to raise awareness about it so society isn’t yet again blindsidedly reamed by rogue politicians who think they should choose how we live our lives. If you would like to do something about this atrocity, you too can spread the word by blacking out your profile or avatar Feb 16-23, posting a message in your blog/social media account, and encouraging your friends to do so as well. These uptight politicians need to know that we are not their children/slaves/pets/whatever the heck they seem to think we are.
Read up more about this here. Thanks to my partner Sharon (@sharonhayes on Twitter, Hayes.net in the blogosphere) for spreading the word to me and thousands of others on Twitter. Let’s all carry on this movement.
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