Changes in copyright laws are changing the Internet and how people use it, increasingly so since 2008, when the Recording Industry Association of America and International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) set out on a quest to make “ISP and intermediary responsibility” the law of the land in one country after another.
The idea that ISPs should be required to block access to websites that facilitate illicit downloading and cut-off Internet service for those who use such sites is not a new idea. While politically impossible to implement during the 1990s, these days “the mood of change is clearly reaching governments,” states the IPFI approvingly.
In the last three years, Britain, France, Sweden, Australia, Ireland, South Korea and Taiwan have adopted new copyright laws in which “intermediary responsibility” and three strikes rules play starring roles. The U.S. Congress is also currently considering two bills that would extend intermediary responsibility beyond ISPs and websites to a slew of new actors – advertisers, search engines, banks and online payment services – by way of the Protect IP and Stop Online Privacy acts.
The most recent convert to the copyright maximalist faith is New Zealand. Its Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Regulations, 2011 kicked into gear in September. The law’s core features sets out a sequence of progressively more punishing measures: notices, potential fines up to $15,000 for repeat offences and cutting Internet service to repeat infringers.
(Luckily for Canadians, these rules represent a far more punitive approach to ISP responsibility than the approach contemplated by the Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C11) currently before Parliament.)
In the past few weeks, the first batch of infringement notices were delivered by the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) to four of the biggest ISPs in the country: Telecom, Vodafone, Orcon and TelstraClear.
The notices target 75 IP addresses on behalf of Universal Music, but one serious question in this is just who does an IP addresses belong to: Individuals, a household, an office, or some other unit of organization? Until this issue is cleared up, whole households risk being removed from the Internet on account of one person on its IP who has run afoul of laws governing just one aspect of life online.
Even before Universal Music and the RIANZ entered the scene, New Zealand’s ISPs had noticed something critically important: a steep drop in international peer-to-peer Internet traffic. Orcon — a major ISP in the country — observed that international P2P Internet traffic fell by 10 per cent immediately after the new law came into effect. It was like somebody clamped down on the country’s Internet connection to the outside world. As the second biggest type of data traffic after streaming video from such websites as YouTube, the decline in Internet traffic is significant.
This is not the first time this has happened. Sweden saw Internet traffic plunge 30 per cent overnight after the country’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) was implemented in April 2009.
From the view of the music and entertainment industries “virtually all P2P content is illegal,” as the IFPI declares. As such, declines in Internet traffic just indicate that the traffic was infringing. And as New Zealand’s Ministry of Economic Development stated, the new law is all about “stopping illegal peer-to-peer file sharing such as sharing movies via BitTorrent.”
But these self-congratulating claims ignore the fact that P2P serves many purposes other than just trafficking in ill-gotten media content, for example:
