The New Zealand Government's Copyright Amendment Act, also known as the Skynet law, which came into effect on September 1, starts showing its powers, recently a large number of ISPs being requested to provide the identities of account holders that hide behind certain IP addresses.
According to
The Register, 75 internauts have already received notices from their service providers regarding illegal download.
Unlike other countries where ISPs give up identities and then leave it to the media industry to take care of the matter in a court of law, or such as in France where a specially appointed company handles all the fines, in New Zealand, each company has to alert its own customers after being notified by the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ).
RIANZ already gave a notice to Telecom New Zealand, asking them to issue copyright infringement notices to 42 of their account holders. Orcon, TelstraClear and Vodafone have also been alerted to serve some of their clients with the same type of notices.
To make sure the Internet providers fully collaborate with the record industry representatives, companies are paid $20 (14 EUR) for each notice they give out to their clients. In order to recover some of the
bounty they pay, each user caught on the third strike will be fined with $12,000 (8,400 EUR).
Lately we've seen all sorts of laws designed by governments in collaboration with the media industry in the attempt of putting a stop to piracy. Some of them are successful, while others fail miserably.
To fully understand the impact of these new regulations, we'll have to wait a few years and judge them depending on the long-term effects they have. Naturally some users might stop pirating once they're faced with a $12,000 (8,400 EUR) bill, but the real bad guys, the ones who sell bootlegged products might not be so intimidated.
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