Published on the 20/03/2012 | Written by Newsdesk
Industry group the New Zealand Computer Society (NZCS) has released the first draft of its voluntary code-of-conduct document, the Cloud Computing Code of Practice, one of the first of its kind in the world…
The document represents a first step towards self-regulation for New Zealand’s burgeoning cloud computing industry. The documents self-described purpose is to “enable professional cloud service providers to benchmark and demonstrate their practices, processes and ethics via a recognised third party…allowing [customers] to make informed decisions based on the disclosure of practices of the service provider, enabling the end users to gain comfort with the service provider’s ability to meet end users requirements”.
According to Joy Cottle, CloudCode Facilitator at NZCS, the code draft is “based on what the industry is asking for both from a consumer and supplier perspective and…a code of practice that is easily adopted by the providers and easily understood by the consumer.”
“New Zealand is one of the first internationally to develop such a code and is leading the way globally and there are many international eyes set on us right now to see the results of the work born from wide consultation and how we apply the code once it is finalised,” she says.
Surprisingly, given the recent dramatic takedown of file transfer service Megaupload, the document only makes passing mention of ownership issues around stored data, stipulating that “ownership of data supplied by the client to the service provider needs to be clearly disclosed”, that cloud providers must disclose their upstream providers’ position on user data, and that the ownership of meta data and other statistical information should be made apparent to users.
iStart raised the issue with Paul Matthews, NZCS’s chief executive, and asked him what sort of stance he thought the final version of the CloudCode should take on the issue of copyrighted content being hosted by New Zealand cloud providers.
“The Copyright issue is a difficult and complex one, primarily around obligations to remove copyrighted material,” he said.
“For instance, should there be (and is there legally) an obligation to proactively remove copyright material or just upon notification? What are the rights of the claimed copyright owner vs the content owner vs the hoster? At what point does this become a legal issue for the hoster? Should this be part of the Code?
“My personal view is that there’s certainly scope to proactively disclose any policy principles around alleged copyright infringement in plain English as part of the CloudCode and I understand that Joy Cottle, the CloudCode Coordinator, is now consulting with some experts directly on this point specifically (as well as general consultation)…”
“The key point is that we’re very open about the fact that there may well be these sorts of holes in the draft, which is why we’re so keen that as many eyes as possible are cast on this during consultation. This really is the industry’s chance to ensure everything has been covered and to ensure the Code is going to work for them.”
The NZCS is now calling for feedback on how the document should be applied (“Should it only apply to providers where all of their offerings are compliant? Or is some enough? Or should the Cloud Code apply to the products themselves rather than the provider?”), the nature of disclosure statements and how they should be presented to customers, as well as who should ultimately be responsible for ongoing governance of the document.
Among the major contributors to the document were Equinox, Gen-i, OneNet, Webdrive and Xero, with additional input from Salesforce.com, Google, EOSS Online Ltd, InternetNZ, NZRise andSystems Advisory Services.
