The law I referred to requires political parties to have democratic selection of their candidates. That's the minimum bar, with the details of the democratic involvement not prescribed by law.

In the case of the Internet Party, any member can put up their hand to be a candidate. Members will express their views about the potential candidates and rank those on an "indicative list". Then the Executive Committee will finalise the list. Much of the member evaluation will be facilitated by digital means which, in practice, allows all members to be far more involved in the selection than decentralised approaches.

Re policy development, while the Executive Committee appoints people on to the Policy Committee, there will be a process for all members to get involved in discussing the policies and manifesto.

There will be lots of member inputs, more so than any other political party. But final decisions will be made by the Executive Council. That's what the rules (and, by the way, the law) says.

Thanks for linking and commentary on the rules. It would've been good for your anonymous commentator to comment against each of the points as to how they compare with other parties to point out what's 'usual' and what's not.

As to Internet Party Assets Incorporated, it hasn't been incorporated yet. Almost every political party in NZ has a political organisation and a separate arm that looks after finances, contracts, etc. What varies is the nature of that separate arm. The Internet Party selected the form to be an incorporated society.

I'm happy to answer any questions, criticisms, or comments about the Internet Party's rules.

Thanks
Vikram Kumar
Internet Party Chief Executive

Funnily enough, as far as I have been able to determine from MEGA's records, CLNZ did not actually get around to giving MEGA a copyright takedown notice for both the files. (Not that I'm encouraging takedowns without notice from the copyright owner or their agent for all the reasons discussed in this thread, but with all the effort that went into press releases, appearing on TV, etc. one would imagine they would find the time to actually give formal notice to MEGA).

Here are the stats: 435 million files uploaded to MEGA in 9 months, of which 0.05% received a notice of alleged copyright infringement. I think the numbers speak for themselves (thankfully) about MEGA being used for widespread copyright infringement.

Yes, the two files were only ever downloaded by the same person who uploaded them and that too only once. This has been confirmed by our log files. Notably, the VUP press release was based on, and relied upon, Cameron Slater's blog post, in that it appears they themselves did not download or independently confirm the alleged copyright infringement.

A lot of people have asked how MEGA identified the two files and any implications of that for privacy.

I saw a tweet that pointed to the blog post on Whaleoil. There were screenshots of the two files, partially obscured. MEGA URLs have two parts- the first points to the file on MEGA and the second (optional) part is the decryption key. Our tech team were able to look at the screenshots and locate them from the first part of the respective links.

MEGA does not takedown files for alleged copyright infringement without getting a formal notice from the copyright owner or their agent for exactly the reasons you have stated. However, in this particular case, I decided to act without waiting for a formal notice.

MEGA did not have an ability to look at the files as the decryption keys part of the URLs were too obscured. In line with MEGA's published policy, the company acts on information received rather than make a subjective judgement about a particular file.

This should re-affirm MEGA's user controlled encryption, i.e. without the decryption key that only the uploader has, MEGA is unable to view stored files. This also applies to doing a general search for a particular file by name as the name of files are also not visible to MEGA.

MEGA protects privacy but will act when people abuse the service to the extent possible.