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Under government pressure, copyright holders and ISPs in New Zealand have been meeting for months to hash out a Code of Conduct for disconnecting repeat Internet “pirates.” It’s a process that requires the unanimous agreement of all parties, but ISP TelstraClear has now publicly refused to back the process, saying that disconnecting users based on content owner complaints was simply unfair.

The New Zealand government decided last year that this sort of “graduated response” mechanism sounded like a hunky-dory way to curtail the rampant trading of copyrighted works online. The result was a new section of copyright law, section 92a, which said that “an Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.”

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