New Zealand piracy halved by the three strike law, the industry says

According to the numbers sent out by RIANZ (Recording Industry Association of New Zealand), the controversial three strike law approved in New Zealand during the past Summer has been pretty effective in doing its primary job: piracy levels have been halved, the organization said, but there is much more to do for the future.

RIANZ refers in particular to a sharp decline in documented illegal accesses to pirated contents from August (110,000) to September of 2011 (50,000), while the total amount of “infringement letters” sent out to New Zealand Internet users thus far is 2,766.

Unfortunately for anti-piracy efforts of the kiwi content industry and related organizations, the aforementioned 50,000 number of illegal downloads “plateaued” and remained the same for the months following September 2011.

Now it’s time to increase the efforts in fighting on-line piracy, RIANZ suggests, and the Internet Service Providers should do their part by slashing the cost to send a single infringement letter from to 25 NZD to just 2 NZD: thanks to this huge discount, the copyright industry could send 5,000 letters per month.

But the Internet providers aren’t keen to keep up with the industry desire for anti-piracy bashing of their users: according to Telecom, the infrastructure needed to manage the infringement warning cost more than half a million dollars and yet the provider only sent 1,238 “letters” in roughly a year. The cost per warning should instead increase to 104 NZD, the ISP said.

Source: BBC News