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Three-Strikes Copyright Law In NZ Halves Infringement
Bismillah writes "The 'Skynet' copyright act has been in effect for six months in New Zealand and rights holders reckon it halved the number of infringements in the first month. Even so, they're not happy and say over forty per cent of Kiwis continue to infringe online. The fix? Rightsholders want the current NZ$25 infringement notice processing fee payable to ISPs to be dropped to just a few dollars or even pennies, so that they can send out thousands of notices a month. ISPs want the fee to increase four times instead, to cover their costs. Unfortunately, the submissions for the review of the infringement notice fees are kept secret by the government."
My completely anectdotal experience living in NZ is that people just found other ways. Seedboxes especially may have actually made the industry's problem worse as they're much faster for P2P connections than local NZ broadband connections have ever been and as such the volumes achievable are higher. For example I used to hear people talk of only getting averages of 200-300Kbps with P2P using the cheap ISP supplied modems, but they can get 2Mbps+ over an HTTP connection to a seedbox, and that seedbox itself might achieve 10MBps or more.
There was a 10% drop in NZ internet volume when the law came into effect, but little mention of the numbers since.
So yes, I'm inclined to believe they are seeing less infringement, but in reality there's likely more than ever.