On Monday 23 March Prime Minister John Key announced that the government would throw out Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act and work towards a replacement.

This is fantastic news, and it's great that Prime Minister John Key has taken a stand on this important issue. This draconian and naïve law was originally championed by former-MP Labour's Judith Tizard. Now we need to help make some sensible copyright law that will protects artists and well as New Zealanders.

Throughout the process of pushing for S92's repeal we acknowledged that there is a considerable issue with copyright infringement online. S92 was not the way to fix this, so we have been working on a draft that we hope will sensibly deal with the issue, while retaining New Zealander's fundamental right to due process.

The document has been released for public comment on the CFF website www.CreativeFreedom.org.nz under the title “Fix Section 92” and we encourage New Zealand artists and others who were concerned by S92A to make submissions on this draft document·

At the core of the draft document is the idea of an additional branch to the existing Copyright Tribunal specifically for these disputes, an adoption of the internationally popular notice-and-notice model, and a variety of sanctions. This aims to be an efficient resolution to copyright infringement in an online environment.

We will be presenting this draft document to the government, so read and comment on the proposed alternative here and contribute towards making this a strong, workable alternative to S92A.