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New Zealand record industry says three-strikes has been “costly” and “disappointing”
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 16 September 2015
Ah, three strikes. Remember how the Digital Economy Act in 2010 put all that in place in the UK? And then it never really happened. Oh well, in New Zealand it did happen and, according to the General Counsel of trade group Recorded Music NZ, it’s been “really disappointing”. So perhaps we were better off with ‘graduated response’ remaining unimplemented law after all.
New Zealand was one of the first countries to pass laws to force internet service providers to send warning letters to suspected file-sharers, with a system in place to introduce sanctions against persistent pirates if they fail to heed warnings about copyright infringement after three letters have been sent, hence “three-strikes”.
Although welcomed by the country’s music industry when first introduced a few years back, Recorded Music NZ’s Kristin Bowman has said that the costs put in place for rights owners have made the system less attractive.
Labels must pay the ISP $25 for each warning letter sent, and then $200 to make a formal complaint as part of the post-letter-sending sanctions process. So $275 per file-sharer, which might not sound much, until your monitoring processes see thousands and thousands of people accessing content from unlicensed sources.
Speaking to Stuff, Bowman said New Zealand’s three-strikes system had proven “too costly” which was “really disappointing”. She added: “Every time we send a notice it costs us $25. We would love to do a thousand of those a week, but we just can’t afford it”.
Whenever three-strikes type systems are proposed, there is much debate over who should cover the administrative costs, with rights owners usually pushing for internet service providers to pay, because they are the ones profiting from the file-sharing customer. Though usually rights owners and net firms have to share the expense.
However, Bowman denied that her local record industry was giving up on the three-strikes system entirely, stressing that educating file-sharers is her priority, and that letter sending has a role to play in that effort, even though costs mean rights owners rarely go through with the full letter-sending-and-sanctions process.
