are youtube to mp3 converters illegal?

The movie and music industries are very economically small and unimportant compared to the wider comptuer industry. Basically the chief executives of Google could buy the entire music industry ... with their own money. So how is it then they get a law passed that jeopardises everything?

A lot of technically savvy people have pointed out, these laws will unfairly punish the technically illiterate who perhaps download one or two songs or something. While dedicated pirates will get away scott free with an enormous quantity of downloads. It's rather trivial to hide your downloading from snooping rightsholders and their representitives.

Worse is many rightsholders have been accused of setting up honeypots, indeed lawsuits have become a business model in the US it seems.

Ray #41 how is that any different than downloading a torrent to your PC? the file can still be scanned by the ISP! you might as well spend $14 a month and get easynews... you will still get all the tv shows and not have to upload to anyone else. A VPN service is the way to go if you want to be anonymous as your tunnel to the net is 256bit encrypted and your ip address comes out in the states rather than NZ.

when the inevitable happens and people start to get pinged for this heinous crime, is it the person that is banned from the interweb, or the address of the person?

This "law" just continues to prove how completely and utterly out of touch the "law makers" are with new technologies. They are clearly legislating something they really have no comprehension of. As for all the knockers accusing the law is the law and everyone has to answer for it are one dimensional idiots that couldnt think their way out of a paperbag - SAD -. Until internet access and its and potentials for use and abuse use are finally understood by the ELECTED then we will be wallowing in the technological backwaters and wondering why we are a laughing stock by those that want to truely move forward and grow.

All I hear is talk about making NZ a technology frontier but at the end of the day its nothing more than lipservice and .govt.nz continue to prove this day in day out.

I am more than willing to stand up in court and take this as far as it can go to demonstrate how farcical this is. Its simply not enforceable and it will take only a few test cases to prove it. Good on ya .govt.nz for keeping us in the dark ages.

This law seems unpopular; what is it that National has received from the yanks that offsets the criticism from the public for them to rush through this law under urgency? A backhander perhaps? A generous contribution to the National Party Coffers perhaps? Some other form of gratuity? An opportunity to kiss Obama’s ass?

It seems any time National wants to do anything for the good of their party and not the good of NZ who incidentally are their bosses; not the other way around. They do it under urgency so the public does not have time to protest.

Oh well I guess we only have to put up with this Government until November when we can get some payback.

It is rare for me to be on this side, but I have a low opinion of the UN human rights council.

It has been boycotted by many western countries (including NZ and the US) due to trying to discourage blasphemy without care for rational analysis or freedom of speech.

There may also be an argument against it due to having representatives from countries with appalling human rights records.

And it's done plenty of other questionable reasoning.

People seem to trust it because it has the words UN and Human Rights in it, without knowing much about it.

I don't like the law due to it's assumption of guilt (especially for shared connections), reliance on rightsholders' honesty, and for the way it was rushed through despite having significant public interest (which in my eyes looks suspiciously like trying to avoid public consultation as we had little warning).

However, I don't give the argument that this law breaches the UN's version of human rights much credence.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of a quality UN that acts to uphold human rights. But in my opinion, this one isn't good enough.

Best solution to avoid Being convicted of something is to use VPN ,I have unlimited use for 58US dollars a year, and i can watch (streamed) shows over seas with out downloading.Free tv keeps changing there time slots on shows so many times & there is no other alternative unless you pay very expensive skytv This is what this anti democratic government has forced many into doing,you are guilty until proven innocent.

Skynet based.

NZ needs to properly sharpen up on their internet, to do this we need to introduce expansion not laws to restrict.

Surely the labour/ACT/Maori/Green parties have to simply say "we'll get rid of the skynet law" and they'll win a fair chunk of votes this election...

But more to the point, the reason so many people download "illegally" isn't because they don't want to pay for a service, but there are no services to pay for. Look at the DVD rental service - unlimited DVD's for a set price. How can we do this with internet rentals? The states can and now it these services use more internet than the pirating ways. Give the people a way not to pirate and they won't. Give them the internet to support this & it'll work.

Cutting people off and making a mockery of our government by playing puppet to the states is a way to lose. Way to go Key.