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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."
As I New Zealander I speak for everyone when I say:
Hah!
New Zealand and rights holders reckon it halved the number of infringements in the first month.
Or just as likely, the heaviest downloaders just found better ways to fly under the radar. If "success" is measured by a drop from eighty percent to forty percent of users "stealing" content, I'd say it's time for the Industry to admit total defeat.
Three Squirrels
It's not rights holders doing the complaining, it's the industry associations (read: RIAA/MPAA or NZ equivalents), who themselves hold no copyrights apart from their corporate logos.
To them, I refer them to the response given in Arkell -v- Pressdram (1971):
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
When the law came into effect, everyone shifted to direct download sites, which can't be tracked like torrents can. Then everyone heard from friends who didn't shift that they didn't get any notices, so they've all shifted back.
So, the people behind the law claim that it is effective enough to have been justified, but not effective enough to remove the need for even more industry-friendly laws.
How convenient.
Rights holders 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.
So what they're really saying that infringements actually cost them less than $25 per infringement in the long run. Because if it was like the thousands of dollars per, that they claim, they wouldn't have a bitch about a $25 fee. It would be a no-brainer and the battle against piracy would fatten their coffers easily even with the $25 fee. But no, they say it's too expensive. It's only too expensive if the net gain is negative.
>the ISPs want it increased to $100
Considering the vetting and such and going through the motions to send a customer a notice, I believe it. Even inter-office memos are not free. You'd be surprised what one actually costs if you measured it.
The IP enforcers have no leg to stand on with regards to this argument. By all rights, the ISPs should at least double their price. And the IP enforcers should shut up and take it.
--
BMO
"pennys" ... you'll never hear a New Zealander use that phrase unless they were talking about those antique coins granny has on her mantle piece.
Closest thing to a "penny" is a 10 cent piece (no longer any 1, 2 or 5 cent coinage) so stop trying to nickel and dime away NZ culture
This is getting interesting.
Earlier this month ISPs came to an agreement with the recording/movie industry to enact a "6 strikes" policy to punish copyright infringement. (see ArsTechnica article, as previously discussed on /. -- http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/major-isps-agree-to-six-strikes-copyright-enforcement-plan/ )
The very next day after the article was published, I noticed something interesting when I was using BitTorrent--aside from request overhead, I was uploading zero data. I'm currently watching a 3.1GB torrent--1.79 GB downloaded and 0.0 uploaded. And no, it isn't my client settings. I have checked them several times, nor did I change them any from when I was uploading normally. Seeding a completed torrent does nothing--it just sits there with no activity.
To put it in simple terms, Comcast (my ISP) is throttling uploads by 100% but not touching download rates (at least mine). Are they, in essence, protecting their customers from the "6 strikes" policy they agreed to enforce? If so, I assume they are doing this to prevent losing customers that continue using P2P software.
I can't imagine the MPAA/RIAA will be very happy about this.
a small but not to small fees keeps out abuse and let's small Rights holders have there say.
Have sales gone up?
If sales have gone up, then congratulations, you've scored a minor victory against those stealing to avoid paying for decent content, but if not, what exactly have you achieved? Sure, people have stopped *cough* "stealing" your content, but they're not buying it either, it simply proves it wasn't worth paying for in the first place.
Either that, or they're still downloading it for free, they just figured out another way to do it without getting caught. Thus continuing the perpetual cycle of cat and mouse between the consumer and the dying business model of the entertainment industry.
Only halved? I thought these things were supposed to have a 70% reduction according to the earlier surveys. Oh wait, those surveys are complete rubbish, as is most data on this sort of thing. The surveys for how much this sort of thing would reduce filesharing are all over the place; according to the IFPI, the French version, Hadopi, would cause 71% reduction in unlawful file-sharing, whereas a ZdNet.fr survey put it at 4%. Then there was a really fun Hollywood-sponsored survey from Australia that found 74% would stop infringing - unfortunately, in the fine detail, it turned out only 11% were actually committing copyright infringement on a regular basis, so at least 15% of people don't infringe regularly, but wouldn't stop even if threatened by their ISP.
This is definitely one of those "detailed-study-complete-with-full-figures-and-methodology or it didn't happen" situations.
However, it is interesting to see that the RIANZ are claiming that half isn't enough, and that more needs to be done. It mirrors my concerns about these laws elsewhere (particularly in the UK, obviously) that they have no criteria for success or failure, nor any real way to measure effectiveness. It means that once implemented the RIAA/Rianz/BPI are free to say "This is working, so we need more!" or "This isn't working, so we need more!" or "We're not sure whether or not this is working, so we need more!" no matter what actually happens, and we're back to copyright enforcement for the sake of copyright enforcement.
Fortunately in the EU these sorts of charges to ISPs were declared unlawful, so copyright owners are being forced to meet most of the bill for the UK three-strikes program (although subscribers will have to pay an arbitrary £20 to appeal allegations made against them).
The one good thing about the UK version, though, is that the government were persuaded that, once the three-strikes law is in force, someone should actually look into whether or not such a law is needed or will do any good, so in a year or so, after over 1m letters being sent (and however many lawsuits and prosecutions), we may actually get some independent and reliable data on this whole "online infringement of copyright" thing.
[Disclaimer: I 'work' as a lobbyist in this area and am currently in the middle of consultation work on the UK version of this sort of thing - so I'm rather biased. For anyone in the UK interested in this, the Ofcom consultation is available here and closes on Thursday.]
I'm pretty sure that a good number of New Zealanders are now using VPN services now, likely offshore.
Is this a victory for the copyright people? Nope. The steps they have to take next are to force ISPs to block VPNs (which likely violates free speech laws), demand VPNs offer IP address mappings by request (fat chance, especially in another country), or pass a law requiring all Internet facing endpoints have a DRM stack which notifies a central authority if it is tampered with, similar to XBL.
Real police work is now severely screwed by this. Now that the pirates are now running black pipes, the child pornographers will follow suit, so the real crimes against people will not be able to be detected, when before the Draconian copyright laws, it was a matter of sitting back and running a utility like Splunk on packet headers.
While it's true that P2P traffic has decreased in NZ after the law, the tunneling traffic has increased. See bellow: :)
http://www.matthewtaylor.co.nz/2012/03/11/three-strikes-law-shifted-file-sharing-from-torrents-to-tunnels/
http://www.wand.net.nz/sites/default/files/nznog12_0.pdf
Media cartels judging if their 3-strikes approach is successful based on how many people they punish. Someone needs to remind them that their job is to promote the sale of music/movies.
If they paired their research on punishment, with data on legal sales then it might be meaningful, as it stands its just a scare story.
Where Rianz and co say the fee should be dropped from $20 per notice to $2 or less and the ISPs countering that with the largest saying it should cost over $1000 per notice, as they have spend half a million dollars complying.
And then be laughed at. The law only targets peer-to-peer file sharing. Unless you can convince an MP or such to download it as a torrent and seed it your infringement notices will be a waste of $20.
I'm sure Melissa Lee could put it on a CD for you. It was all legally obtained after all!
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
If you want music for your collection, YouTube + one of the many YouTube to MP3 options is one way to get a specific song that their anti-piracy detection methods probably cant pick up.
That or downloading from any number of websites offering music for download (including file sharing sites)
For movies & TV, if you want to watch something once (and dont care so much about the quality) YouTube is a good way to do it if you can find a copy. If YouTube doesn't have it, plenty of other video sites that probably do...
Plenty of options that dont involve using P2P software to download mainstream content (although I wish YouTube would do more about the people who upload the dodgy videos saying "we cant upload this film to YouTube because its been blocked but go to dodgyvideosite.com to watch it" with a link to some dodgy scam site)
This law was introduced as a one strike(!) law with no fees(!!!!!!!) by the major left wing party government of the day. The same politicians tried to undermine the (now in government) major right wing party by accusing them of implementing laws at the directive of American interests. Of course that right wing party eventually passed the watered down version that we now have in place. You just can't win with politics. I'm sorry but as a NZer, the whole thing to me just stinks. The appropriate insult in the local vernacular: the bloody mongrels! Honestly, I'm not a protester. There are many of those and I don't identify at all. However, this issue is nearly enough for me to vocalise my feelings. Defend your content rights by all means, but do it honestly. You wont convince me that the NZ film and TV industry is not worth the amount claimed: nearly the size of the NZ economy, as I've seen on posters in video shops. When I see that sort of thing, I just don't go in to spend my money. Good on Sky TV for making content available online ASAP after initial screenings overseas. I hope they expand this and others follow suit.
I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
The problem is that 40% of the people are breaking the law as it is written.
There are two basic ways of solving this:
- Punish 40% of New Zealanders, or
- Change the laws
Methinks the second option deserves more consideration
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I live in NZ, and a quote I heard on the radio lately says it all: "streaming is the new torrenting". Instead of torrenting you connect to one of the indexing sites and simply stream what you want to watch. That's what we do now. Not only does it use less data allowance, but as far as I know it's actually legal too, as you're not offering a copy to anyone else.
:)
About the only hassle is the stupid ads, and some of the sites stream data to you too slowly to watch in real time. We've gotten in the habit of kicking those off at night and running hobocopy to copy the stream files from Temp inside my profile folder. Then VLC plays 'em whenever I like
And music? There are indexing sites for that too. We really did try to go legit there, but with all the region restrictions and limited catalog rubbish it was such a pain in the ass. The indexing sites have it all...
Now that he's out again and online, I'm sure he'll skew that statistic just like every other statistic....
;-)
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
The haves wanting more, whodathoughtit.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
they are the judge jury and executioner for anyone caught stealing or purported to be stealing their
precious IP. The sad thing is is that politicians will let them do so because they are just as corrupt as
those doing the bribery.
The law only targets peer-to-peer file sharing.
For extra fun downloading from a server is not covered by this law so downloading a movie using bit torrent could get you a strike but downloading from megaupload wouldn't. Hmmm, co-incidence?
I'd like to see the ISPs MRTG graphs, in support of this claim. In theory, they should also have seen a very significant drop in traffic.
Otherwise, "Three strikes law in NZ doubles the number of people switching to Usenet, or using TOR, or other methods" might be more accurate...
Brein is the music mafiaa in Holland where they forced a ban on thepiratebay.org. They then claimed this worked and reduced piracy. The ISP then said they could see no reduction in network traffic, neither has there been an increase in online purchases. Now, I am willing to entertain the thought that Ziggo (ISP) is lying but KPN? Their network engineers are the kind who drive volvo's. They can't lie, it does not fit in their world.
But Brein lying? I can't even conceive of the idea of them telling the truth.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We will shift further away from full paid, new release entertainment even if we have to mine the 20th century in audio and black and white entertainment. We will not subsidize fascism. Turned off the cable TV racket 7-8 years ago.
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Absent sufficient details on the methodology used, one would have to question the conclusion.
Either Kiwis effectively are downloading less, or they have found better ways to download files more invisibly.
Seems to me that you flunked Eco 101.
> They need the commodity to be artificially scarce
Scarcity does not necessarily equate to value --- for example, samples of my urine from a particular morning are very scarce, but are unlikely to have any real value (and not totally because they are urine: I'm sure I could get hundreds or even perhaps thousands of dollars from some national intelligence agency for a fresh sample of Ali Khamenei's urine).
I'm not even sure that scarcity is even a necessary condition for value.
Anyway, as others have already stated here, the IP cartels are just doing it wrong. They have become addicted to a particular business model where they can manipulate the public to give their product value, and the viability of this model is vanishing like sand through the hourglass, even as I type.
If you can't blog, tweet. If you can't tweet, like. But by all means, keep sharing.
Ingenius KimDotKom Video/Song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MokNvbiRqCM
Now excuse me, I'm off to fight CETA.
"rights holders reckon it halved the number of infringements in the first month."
CORRECTION: half of your prior offenders got sneakier.
From my dealings with these people, what they want is control. They want to stop people from getting music, films or other entertainment content from the Internet, whether for free or for a price, from anywhere that isn't under their control. That's where the notification system comes in; most people unlawfully file-sharing probably know what they are doing is illegal, they've probably heard most of the arguments about it being "theft" and "depriving poor starving artists" and so on, and either don't believe that or don't care.
Instead, these letters are targeted at the less technologically aware, at parents, at whoever pays the bills, with the aim of scaring them; creating the impression that "if you are letting your child/friend/anyone using your computer get music/films from the Internet and not from an approved site you are breaking the law and we will come after you, and you will face huge fines, and you will be disconnected from the Internet."
The biggest threat the legacy industries face is not from the file-sharing itself, but the spread of this idea that music, film, entertainment content etc. can be acquired for free (or cheaply), whether legally or not, from the Internet. As people get more and more used to low-cost entertainment, they might start questioning why they should pay $20 for a cinema ticket, or $30 for a CD, when they can get a similar experience for free, or for a much smaller fee, elsewhere.
I haven't torrented anything in a long time. With sites such as fastpasstv.ms, I can watch the TV programs I usually watch without the hassle of DVR or worrying about being home in time to catch it in real time on TV. Since I despise commercials more than anything else, Fastpasstv has given me options I never had before. As well, when traffic congestion and buffering become a problem, browser extensions like Video Downloadhelper allow me to download the file in flv format and watch it at my convenience and without the stuttering. As for music, I am an old fart and hopelessly lost in the 60's and 70's. I ahem....obtained all the music I care to listen to years ago. I haven't heard anything since the mid 90's that I would consider worthy of my consumer dollar anyway. Yep, the offshore sites like Fastpasstv are hard to shutdown as well. They've been hit and have moved twice in the past year I believe but it only takes them 72 hours to get up and running again. So maybe NZ might have seen a substantial decrease in "pirate traffic", but then again, people who lose their access to entertainment will immediately seek alternatives. I think this is probably what happened...they just switched the way they do it.
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
The difference is which side is doing to "offering". In a peer to peer system all users who are downloading a file are also offering it to others. In a client-server system it is only the server doing to offering. It's hard to justify saying the client is the one infringing. Peer to peer, everyone is "guilty"
And how did that go? Or is it in the courts?
According to http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7338332/File-sharing-has-dropped-researcher-says/ today, Waikato university academic has actually measured difference in traffic levels pre- and post- implementation of the 'SkyNet' law.