NZ Net Access Denied

I just had a rather nasty shock from Xnet my NZ ISP who suspended our service late last night. Without any notice or explanation. One minute I am merrily mailing away, the next I am cut off for eight hours until their support team started this morning.

Apparently we have been sent two Bittorrent warnings of copyright infringement from the USA, one for a game I have never even played. We do have a wifi network that friends hook into, but I don't police it or check what they do while they are here.

When I spoke to Xnet's head of technical I was told that two email warnings had been sent and therefore we were under suspension. When I dug further I found that these emails had been sent to the Xnet email address that we never check, and they can see on their system that the emails had never been opened. If had known about the first 'infringement' I could have taken steps to make sure it never happened again.

When I queried why they can sent receipts to my Gmail address but not these vital notices, I was told that a system for forwarding emails on to the primary email address on the account had only been set up last week. So they sent mails that they can tell we never got, did not inform us by letter or phone and then they just cut us off. Looking around I'm not the only person to have experienced this. In this blog 'XNET are Spineless and Uncaring' another geek was unceremoniously booted offline after 8 p.m. and the technical department have gone home.

Xnet are not the only NZ ISP who are having to police the internet for the US entertainment industry. My issue is the way it was dealt with. If you are going to cut people off then at least do it while there is a support team available for them to deal with it. Also make sure you clearly inform customers if there is an issue and give them a chance to respond to it.

Internet access is not like a SKY subscription that you can easily live without. My whole business relies on it and this in effect shut us down for a whole night. As for whether we were actually in breach of copyright I have no idea.

The RIAA music lawsuits proved many false positives such as suing people that are dead or don't have a computer. A New Zealand Herald article also reports on a University of Washington study has shown how easy it is to fake malicious US infringement notices.

"Practically any Internet user can be framed for copyright infringement today. By profiling copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing system, we were able to generate hundreds of real DMCA takedown notices for computers at the University of Washington that never downloaded nor shared any content whatsoever.

Further, we were able to remotely generate complaints for nonsense devices including several printers and a (non-NAT) wireless access point. Our results demonstrate several simple techniques that a malicious user could use to frame arbitrary network endpoints. "

All I know is this morning I experienced the blind terror of a geek facing life disconnected from my friends, banking, business and career. With no right to reply or way of proving my innocence in New Zealand, apart from writing to a US Entertainment company, or going to court to prove my innocence. How on earth did we come to this?

This new law is due to come into effect on the 28th February in New Zealand. A group of artists and musicians have set up the Creative Freedom Foundation to fight this, and there is also a Facebook group that you can join.

Update

Mathew Holloway the Facebook group leader has posted a comment from MP Peter Dunne, to show that thankfully the message is reaching the government.

"I too am concerned about the potential breadth of these provisions that has been revealed and the implications for freedom of speech. It appears to go well beyond what was originally intended to be the scope of this legislation. I note that the government has now indicated that it will review this situation, and I will certainly be supporting that, with a view to removing the threat that the provision as it stands contains."

"We adopt this strategy now because there's an urgency to this debate. Over time, the space of free expression has shrunk." –Lawrence Lessig